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networks

Page history last edited by Jay Cross 16 years, 8 months ago

 

 

 

 

Nodes & connections. In setting up aLearnscape, you point to some dots and make it easy to connect them. If your learners are knowledge workers, you let them connect the dots.

 

Christopher Meyer, writing about networks in HBR's Breakthrough Ideas for 2007:

 

An unruly nebula of concepts is floating around the business world right now—social webs, open innovation, customer-created content, and more—all exploring one big question: Now that we see the power of human networks, how can we use them to produce value?

 

But up to now, network-building efforts have been hit or miss. Our desktops are littered with passwords to communities that no longer exist.

 

It’s too early for a general theory of human networks, but some practical guidelines have emerged from the first few years of experience. Fundamentally, the key to getting payback on investment in a network is to think hard about exactly what kind of value you want the network to create. In other words, you must put the work in “network” first.

 

 

Wikipedia on networks & socialnetworks .Jay'sblogs.

 

Social network analysis by Valdis Krebs

The Hidden Power of Who Matters

 

Karen Stephenson's Quantum Theory of Trust by Art Kleiner

 

Another Way of Looking at Learning, fundamental: good network = good learning

 

Does the network work? by David Maister, socially

 

The Business Singularity what the future may bring

 

Value Networks (Verna Alliee), a better way to assess ROI

 

 

The Age of Networks (1999!) by Jay Cross, the fundamentals still apply

Connections,the Impact of Schooling (2003)

 

Doug Engelbart's 1968 demo. Doug has always sought collaboration. Remember Microsoft's former goal? "A PC on every desk." And the first Mac had no communications ports; CDin/CD out. For a long time, Doug was a lone wolf, preaching to deaf ears thatworking with one another is the way to augment human intelligence.

 

Networking

The 12/06 issue of Harvard Business Review has a useful article entitled How Leaders Create and Use Networks by Herminia Ibarra and Mark Hunter. It’s a no-brainer that to succeed in business, you’ve got to take advantage of your network. But not just any old network will do. To be a successful business leader, you must build and maintain three types of networks:

 

Your Operational Network is made up of the people it takes to get your job done. Most of them are insiders. It’s pretty evident who they are. Your goal is to foster deep working relationships with them.

 

Your Personal Network are the people who help you develop personally and professionally. They also keep you informed. Most of them are outsiders. They can come from anywhere. Your goal is breadth, not depth, of these relationships

 

Your Strategic Network becomes more important the higher you go in the organization. These people help you see what the future holds and how to line up stakeholder support. Some come from inside the organzation, some from outside. It’s not obvious who you want to participate: that depends on the strategy. Your goal is to work with people who leverage the linkage between inside and out.

 

WORKING is part of networking. You shouldn’t blow off networking because you don’t have time.

 

The authors caution against the common error of spending too much time on tweaking Outlook entries and not enough time picking up the phone. A network only thrives if it is used.

 

A former friend of mine considers himself a great networker. He’s not. Whenever he calls, I know he’s after something. “Hi, how you doing? How’s the wife? You still have those cute dogs? By the way, do you know anyone high up in Intel?” A great networker calls when she doesn’t need anything.

 

Networking is not in most people’s comfort zone, but it’s a good investment of time on a cost-benefit basis.

In 2007, nurture your networks.

 

 

 

As We May Think by Vannevar Bush. 1945

Battle Lessons by Dan  Baum, 2005

Six Degrees of Lois Weisburg by Malcolm Gladwell, 1999

Kevin Kelly article by Kevin Kelly, 2006

 

 

Trends in the Living Networks from Ross Dawson

 

CHARACTERISTICS OF HIGH-PERFORMANCE NETWORKS

People who are high-performers in their organizations and build successful careers have been shown to have different personal networks to their peers. Their personal networks have the following characteristics:

Diversity. Their networks are highly diverse, across organizations, personal background, gender, hierarchy, area of expertise, and personality.

Awareness. They are aware of who in their organization and beyond has particular talent, experience, and expertise.

Visibility. Their own capabilities and expertise are visible in their organization and beyond. Others are aware of what they can do.

Dynamic. They recognize that their personal networks need to and will change over time, and they make the time to create new relationships rather than simply maintaining their existing pattern of relationships.

Investment. They continually take the time and effort to invest in their networks, both in maintaining existing relationships from their past and immediate work environment, and in building new relationships.

 

ENERGY IN NETWORKS

Energy is created in networks by collaborating to achieve worthwhile outcomes. When people interact with an energizer, they feel energized about possibilities and opportunities. When they interact with a de-energizer, they are more likely to feel deflated and unenthusiastic. Energizers are the real leaders in an organization, by creating positive momentum and activity.

There are six key behaviors that create energizing relationships:

Have and communicate a compelling vision. Energizers can effectively communicate that there is something worthwhile that people can achieve together, and that it is achievable.

Seek and acknowledge quality contributions. Energizers don’t think or say that they have the answer – they always actively seek out the best possibly contributions, and acknowledge those contributions to the group’s efforts.

Interact constructively. Energizers focus on issues not personalities, and always look to build positively on people’s contributions.

Make and fulfil commitments. Energizers do what they say. They recognize that if people see that others are doing their part, they will feel compelled to do theirs. However if people see that others are being slack, they will find no energy to do their allocated tasks.

Give genuine attention to people. Energizers pay attention when people are speaking, listen to comprehend, and engage with others. They are interested in people and what makes them tick. They give time to people and their feelings, and do not treat them solely as a means to an end.

Connect others. Energizers are alert to opportunities to introduce other people. More than trying to connect themselves, they see where people should be connected, and they make those valuable connections.

 

Connections

 

 

When the job environment changed only slowly, corporatelearning involved acquiring the skills and know-how to do the job. Nowcorporate learning means keeping up with the new things you need toknow to do the job, maybe even daily. This takes great connections:sources that know, advice that helps, alerts to what's important, andready answers to questions.

Humans exist in networks. We belong to social networks. Ourheads contain neural networks. Learning consists of making andmaintaining better connections to our networks, be they social,operational, commercial or entertainment.

 

 

Finding answers

Only one infive knowledge workers consistently finds the information needed to dotheir jobs. This happens to knowledge customers too, half of whom nevercomplete online orders. Other studies have found that knowledge workersspend more time recreating existing information they were unaware ofthan creating original material. knowledge workers spend a third oftheir time looking for answers and helping their colleagues do the same.

 

 

Faced with a question, knowledge workers are five times morelikely to turn to another person than to an impersonal source such as adatabase or a file cabinet. Often she asks whoever happens to be closeby—the denizen of the next cubicle or someone getting a cup of coffee.Half the time, this person doesn’t have a clue.

 

 

 


Why some social network services work and others don't— Or: the case for object-centered sociality 

A while ago Iwondered how our relationship to social networking serviceswill change when instead of adding new contacts, we begin to feel likewe'd be better off cutting the links to the people who we actuallydon't know, stopped liking, or no longer want to be associated with forwhatever other reason. I was reminded of this on reading that RusselBeattie has now decidedto link out of LinkedIn. He explains:

 

Yes, I thought about just deleting the people Ididn't know, buteach deletion of a contact requires an individual request to customerservice(it's not just a check box and submit operation) so I finally justdecided tocancel the whole thing. I think in general, people who would want touse thisservice are pretty contactable without using this system, no? ... Andif you'rea hard to reach person, you're most likely not using this sort of thinganyways.Anyone can contact anyone in five hops, so what real use isit?

 

I want to use Russell's question about the 'real use' ofLinkedIn as awindow into what I think is a profound confusion about the nature ofsociality, which was partly brought about by recent use of the term'social network' by AlbertLaszlo-Barabasi and MarkBuchanan in the popular science world, and ClayShirky and others in the social software world. These authorsbuild on the definition of the social network as 'a map of therelationships between individuals.' Basically I'mdefending an alternative approach to social networks here, which I call 'object centered sociality' following the sociologist Karin Knorr Cetina. I'll try to articulate the conceptual difference between the two approaches and briefly demonstrate that object-centered sociality helps us to understand better why some social networking services succeed while others don't.

 

Russell's disappointment in LinkedIn implies that the term 'social networking' makes little sense if we leave out the objects that mediate the ties between people. Think about the object as the reason why people affiliate with each specific other and not just anyone. For instance, if the object is a job, it will connect me to one set of people whereas a date will link me to a radically different group. This is common sense but unfortunately it's not included in the image of the network diagram that most people imagine when they hear the term 'social network.' The fallacy is to think that social networks are just made up of people. They're not; social networks consist of people who are connected by ashared object. That's why many sociologists, especially activity theorists, actor-network theorists and post-ANT people prefer to talk about 'socio-material networks', or just 'activities' or 'practices' (as I do) instead of social networks.

 

Sometimes the 'social just means people' fallacy gets built into technology, like in the case of FOAF, which is unworkable because it provides a format for representing people and links, but no way to represent the objects that connect people together. The social networking services that really work are the ones that are built around objects. And, in my experience, their developers intuitively 'get' the object-centered sociality way of thinking about social life. Flickr, for example, has turned photos into objects of sociality. On del.icio.us the objects are the URLs. EVDB, Upcoming.org, and evnt focus on events as objects. LinkedIn, however, is becoming the victim of its own cunning: it started off thinking it could benefit by playing up the 'social just means people' misunderstanding. As Russell put it,

 

That was the "game" right? He who has the most contacts wins. Atfirst you were even listed by the number of contacts you had,remember?

 

Reid Hoffman's choice (however unintentional it might have been, I don't know) to encourage the use of LinkedIn as a game is what activity theorist Frank Blackler would call the introduction a 'surrogate object.' The surrogate object is actually not sustained by the economic, technical, and cultural arrangement that the activity relies on to sustain itself. Playing 'Who has the most connections wins' might have been fun to some people for a while, but it was not very valuable to the users and developers as a collective in the long run. Now LinkedIn is trying to change the object of sociality thatit offers, and persuade people to re-orient their networks around theiractual jobs. (Don't get me wrong—I'm the first to support Reid and histeam on their endeavour to make LinkedIn moreuseful as a medium for job-centered sociality!)

 

Last but not least, we can use the object-centered socialitytheory to identify new objects that are potentially suitable for socialnetworking services. Take the notion of place, for example. Annotatingplaces is a new practice for which there is clearly a need, but forwhich there is nosuccessful service at the moment because thetechnology for capturing one's location is not quite yetcheap enough, reliable enough, and easy enough to use. In other words,to get a 'Flickrfor maps' we first need a 'digital camera for location.'Approaching sociality as object-centered is to suggest that when itbecomes easy to create digital instances of the object, the onlineservices for networking on, through, and around that object will emergetoo. Social network theory fails to recognise such real-world dynamicsbecause its notion of sociality is limited to just people.

 

For a much more elaborate academic argument aboutobject-centered sociality , see the chapter on 'Objectual Practice' byKarin Knorr Cetina in Thepractice turn in contemporary theory, edited by Theodor R.Schatzki, Karin Knorr Cetina, and Eike von Savigny (London 2001:Routledge.)


The Network Age

 

 

from Ross Mayfield, 2003: Perhaps we are in the Network AgeMing, followingmodernism and post-modernism. After obsessing about construction, thendeconstruction, we now value the links between deconstructed bits. Whenthose links are between people, they can be valued as social capital.

 

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