On Friday, I had lunch again with Peter Gloor who continues to do very interesting work in social network analysis (SNA) through the CKN tool that he and his colleagues have developed. The Collaborate Knowledge Networks project is sponsored by MIT Sloan’s Center for Coordination Science and the Dartmouth Center for Digital Strategies.
As the site says, “the CKN project conducts research on how organizations can become more innovative, efficient, and a better place to work by applying the principles of Collaborative Knowledge Networks.” Their goal is to “come up with a framework of temporal communication patterns typical of different types of collaborative knowledge networks.”
By data mining e-mail files and other forms of electronic communication, including blogs and wikis, they can generate visualizations of social networking patterns that move over time in a flash movie format. For example, they have found ideal patterns at the different stages of an idea’s life cycle. At the initial innovation stage, a core team typically engages in a dense dialog of equals around the leader to generate ideas and they are surrounded by supporters. After the idea takes form, the team leaders communicate the vision out to the broader organization. Finally, pockets of networked communities of interest support the idea on an ongoing basis.
The web site provides much more detail and you can watch flash movies of the communication patterns as they evolve over time. You can also download their open source tool for your own use, as well as many of their research papers.
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