5. Small World Publications circa 2003 (Freeman, 2004, p. 166). http://www.cmu.edu/joss/content/articles/volume9/Freeman/
6.
7. Quizmaster Phil Nice was identified by south-east London residents as somene who was good at bringing people together. Photograph: Martin Godwin for the Guardian
What is a social network? we use social network to describe a platform but it's really a social formation
the rise of social networking sites has surfaced the fact that offline social networks are already functioning in all parts of our lives and society Social network analysis through algorithms network analysts rely extensively on the use of mathematics and graph theory. As Freeman notes, “[f]rom the outset, the network approach to the study of behavior has involved two commitments: (1) it is guided by formal theory organized in mathematical terms, and (2) it is grounded in the systematic analysis of empirical data.”
Social networks analysis proposes that social behavior and processes should be “explained with reference to networks of social relations that link actors or “nodes”. The unit of analysis can be an individual person, a group, an organization or even the whole of ‘society’, as “any entity that is connected to a network of other such entities will do” network analysts contend that “the structure of relations among actors and the location of individual actors in the network have important behavioral, perceptual, and attitudinal consequences both for the individual units and for the system as a whole” http://nicomedia.math.upatras.gr/conf/CAWM2003/Papers/Kavada.pdf The maths and the diagrams go hand-in-hand can support intuition, can also mislead...
SNA basics – see http://www.orgnet.com/sna.html Degree Centrality Betweenness Centrality Closeness Centrality Network Integration Boundary Spanners Peripheral Players Online networks provide huge volumes of data for social network analysis
EXERCISE: think of 2 social networks and a bridge person...
RSA http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2010/sep/15/big-society-community-networks 'Big society' facilitators are found within communities Phil Nice runs a popular Monday night quiz at a pub in south London that is famed locally for its speed cake-eating contest, audience participation (in return for chocolates), and anti-north London jokes. Nice has also been named by a respected thinktank as a potential key player in building David Cameron's much-discussed "big society". It is all down to his well-connectedness. A quarter of the 280 people they talked to could not name anyone in their social network they thought was good at bringing people together or could help them contact someone with influence, power or responsibility to change things locally.
Sainsburys... connecting the isolates The RSA will spend the next year feeding back the findings published in Connected Communities to residents, and helping them to design and test interventions based on these networks to address local problems. But what will be the "bridging capital" that fosters links between New Cross Gate's middle-class residents up on Telegraph Hill and poorer residents in areas around the tube station? MA people – gaia marcus will be doing a couple of sandbox sessions
VIDEO mubarak twitter: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2guKJfvq4uI&feature=related by panisson on youtube Data collected with Gephi Graph Streaming. This is a preliminary result of the network of retweets with the hashtag #jan25 at February 11 2011, at the time of the announcement of Mubarak's resignation. If you retweeted someone, or has been retweeted, it is possible that your username is in this network. The data were collected through the Twitter streaming and search APIs by André Panisson, and is part of a research project involving the Computer Science Department of the University of Turin (www.di.unito.it), the Complex Networks and Systems Group of the ISI Foundation (www.isi.it), and the Center for Complex Networks and Systems Research of Indiana University (cnets.indiana.edu). You can find other similar videos about dynamic networks analysis on http://www.youtube.com/user/truthyatindiana
Socio-spatial remember the numbers. Now the networks. We discuss how distance still matters: individuals tend to create social ties with people living nearby much more likely than with persons further away, even though strong heterogeneities still appear across different users. In fact, we discover how about 40% of social connections between users are shorter than 100 km, http://www.syslog.cl.cam.ac.uk/2011/07/15/socio-spatial-properties-of-online-social-networks/
Social capital According to Robert Putnam, social capital "refers to the collective value of all 'social networks' and the inclinations that arise from these networks to do things for each other."[2] A growing body of research has found that the presence of social capital through social networks and communities has a protective quality on health. David Halpern argues that the popularity of social capital for policymakers is linked to the concept's duality, coming because "it has a hard nosed economic feel while restating the importance of the social." For researchers, the term is popular partly due to the broad range of outcomes it can explain; The appearance of the modern social capital conceptualization is a new way to look at this debate, keeping together the importance of community to build generalized trust and the same time, the importance of individual free choice, in order to create a more cohesive society (Ferragina, 2010[18]). It is for this reason that social capital generated so much interest in the academic and political world (Rose, 2000[19]). expresses a fear that in modern society the important stuff that holds communities together is going down the pan... this is 'seeing through social networks' Here, social capital is another tool in the armoury of the elite, deployed to ensure that the ‘wrong’ kind of people don’t enter their circles (Bourdieu, 1986, 1992).
Anticategorical imperative The main thread of criticism concerns the inadequate conceptualization of human agency and culture. In that respect, network analysis is often criticised for its structural determinism, which “neglects altogether the potential causal role of actors’ beliefs, values, and normative commitments” (Emirbayer and Goodwin 1994: 1425). Instead, it produces network ‘snapshots’ of social structure through time, paying insufficient attention to the historical mechanisms which dominated their emergence. Another problem of social network analysis is “[t]he abstruse terminology and state-of-the-art mathematical sophistication” which seems “to have prevented many of these “outsiders” from venturing anywhere near it. White’s seminal contributions and considers networks as “crucial environments for the activation of schematas, logics, and frames” (Breiger Forthcoming). “White (1992) considered discursive “narratives” and “stories” to be fundamental to structural pursuits, writing that “stories describe the ties in networks” and that “a social network is a network of meanings” (Ibid). “This perspective prompts a reflection on the relationship between the social networks and the cognitive maps through which actors make sense of and categorize their social environment and locate themselves within broader webs of ties and interactions.” (Diani 2003: 5).
Confusion... Sns also as tool to reorganise society c.f. end of shirky ch.1
A classic example of this is a VKontakte group called Informal Public Association - Healthcare for Children! [ru], which was created by Daria Makarova, a young mother from Novosibirsk who lost her child. The goal of this group is to promote changes in the area of children's healthcare in the Novosibirsk region. Within a few months of existence, six thousand people had already joined. This group is leading an active campaign: holding meetings with the directors of Novosibirsk's healthcare system, employing experts, monitoring the condition and requirements of the region's children's hospitals, and carrying out fundraising activities.
kozarac.ba, The town of Kozarac was ethnically cleansed in 1992 and of the 24,00 mostly Bosniak citizens who survived, most were scattered around the world, republika serpska returnees set up an online community, internet centres and other media that provide a forum for the town to connect with the diaspora around the world Initially, there were several related sites, but Kozarac.ba has emerged as the main forum and it http://www.headshift.com/our-blog/2008/10/26/solving-real-world-problems-th/
Overall, this is a study of how virtual community can sometimes help overcome immense structural damage to real-world networks in the physical realm. But Kozarac.ba has also overcome another kind of structural hole in the networks that form the community. Central to the techniques of ethnic cleansing in this area was the idea of eliticide,
this self-funded fire service has gone from strength to strength, and the local Serb authorities have been forced to give them official recognition. They stick to their principle that “the only enemy is fire”, and there is no such thing as a Serb fire or a Bosniak fire, and as a result they are winning fans even among surrounding Serbian towns who would otherwise have little do to with Kozarac. This is quite an achievement to say the least.
# Focus on the users primary activity - goals, activities, tasks. Goals are the end conditions people are striving for. Activities are the tasks people do to achieve their goals e.g for netflix the flow would look something like this - entertainment - renting movies - rating, adding to queue, discussing movies. It acts as a clear and consistent method for organising feature-set ideas. # Identify social objects, these objects mediate social activities. Discover these objects and the interactions around them, they can be real life like Facebook, or the Amazon wish list - or they can be jobs and dates, projects and events. Give the social objects a URL - this makes objects sharable, easier to find & refind, and allows users to link directly, search engines like them. # Choose core feature set. Joshua Porter calls this finding your verbs. It is the idea of selecting what actions are associated with the noun - eg videos = play, stop, edit, store, upload, share, comment, embed.
DARPA challenge Those who directly found one of the 10 balloons were offered $2,000, with the remaining $2,000 going to charity. But according to team members, the key to their success was also rewarding those whose input directly helped to find the balloons. If, for example, you invited the person who actually found the balloon to join the network, you would receive $1,000, with $1,000 going to charity. The person who invited you would receive $500, and so on. In addition to the monetary rewards, the system also allowed all participants to see their direct impact on the social network. The Media Lab team assembled its strategy in only four days. It launched a Web site on Thursday, December 3, and enlisted close to 5,000 participants in just 48 hours. By 6:52 pm on Saturday, December 5–only 8 hours and 52 minutes after the contest began–the team had located all 10 of the eight foot-by-eight-foot balloons, which were tethered to the ground at various locations from coast to coast.
Ravelry http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2009/09/02/Ravelry 2009: We’ve got 430,000 registered users, in a month we’ll see 200,000 of those, about 135,000 in a week and about 70,000 in a day. We peak at 3.6 million pageviews per day Ravelry has been mentioned by Tim Bray as one "of the world’s more successful deployments of Ruby and Rails technologies."[5] We peak at 3.6 million pageviews per day. That’s registered users only (doesn’t include the very few pages that are Google accessible) and does not include the usual API calls, RSS feeds, AJAX. Actual requests that hit Rails per day is 10 million. 900 new users sign up per day. The forums are very active with about 50,000 new posts being written each day. Some various numbers — 2.3 million knitting/crochet projects, 19 million forum posts, 13 million private messages, 8 million photos (the majority are hosted by Flickr). 2011: The site now has 1.4 million registered users, though only about 400,000 of those are active every month.
Beyond the “Ravelry is a knit and crochet community”, we usually say that Ravelry is three things: 1. An organizational tool for knitters and crocheters. A project album, yarn stash album/inventory, needle inventory — everything a knitter/crocheter might want for personal organization. 2. A yarn and pattern database and research tool. Our community-edited yarn and pattern database is something that has never existed before. If someone else has used a pattern or yarn, no matter how obscure, you can probably find information and project photos on Ravelry. The personal organizational tool is actually entirely public and we were able to create this database by encouraging people who share their projects and information (by using the organizational tools) to contribute to the yarn and pattern directory. 3. A social site. Forums, groups, friend-related features (like viewing an activity stream of friend’s handspun yarn, projects, etc being added) all give people ways to interact with other knitters and crocheters. 4. ... there is a also a 4th item, which is “a tool for independent designers and yarnies” (we use “yarnies” as a nickname for yarn dyers/spinners) From the very beginning, giving small indie designers/yarnies a way to show off their work and get the word out has been a very important part of Ravelry. We feel that we’ve helped many people find an audience and we’re proud of that.
"The community-edited yarn and pattern database is something that has never existed before. If someone else has used a pattern or yarn, no matter how obscure, you can probably find information and project photos on Ravelry. The personal organizational tool is actually entirely public and we were able to create this database by encouraging people who share their projects and information (by using the organizational tools) to contribute to the yarn and pattern directory." Ravelry's success is evidence in favor of an argument that you often hear from Facebook's critics: A single giant social network is no fun. Social sites work better when they're smaller and bespoke, created to cater to a specific group. What makes Ravelry work so well is that, in addition to being a place to catch up with friends, it is also a boon to its users' favorite hobby—it helps people catalog their yarn, their favorite patterns, and the stuff they've made or plan on making. In other words, there is something to do there. And having something to do turns out to make an enormous difference in the way people interact with one another on the Web. But another reason is the brilliant way Ravelry has struck a compromise between disclosure and anonymity. Technically, people on the site are anonymous—... Because everything you say on the site is associated with your profile, and because your profile houses everything you've knitted and want to knit (which, for many people, is more personal than a name and email address), members feel they have a strong stake in the site. For that reason, there's a strong incentive not to speak out of turn.