Reading the Source Code of Social Ties

Though online social network research has exploded during the past years, not much thought has been given to the exploration of the nature of social links. Online interactions have been interpreted as indicative of one social process or another (e.g., status exchange or trust), often with little systematic justification regarding the relation between observed data and theoretical concept. Our research aims to breach this gap in computational social science by proposing an unsupervised, parameter-free method to discover, with high accuracy, the fundamental domains of interaction occurring in social networks. By applying this method on two online datasets different by scope and type of interaction (aNobii and Flickr) we observe the spontaneous emergence of three domains of interaction representing the exchange of status, knowledge and social support. By finding significant relations between the domains of interaction and classic social network analysis issues (e.g., tie strength, dyadic interaction over time) we show how the network of interactions induced by the extracted domains can be used as a starting point for more nuanced analysis of online social data that may one day incorporate the normative grammar of social interaction. Our methods finds applications in online social media services ranging from recommendation to visual link summarization.Comment: 10 pages, 8 figures, Proceedings of the 2014 ACM conference on Web (WebSci'14

From social network to firm performance: The mediating effect of trust, selling capability and pricing capability

Purpose – The purpose of this study is to develop a structural equation model to explain the complex relationship between social network and firm performance by introducing the mediating role of trust, selling capability and pricing capability. Design/methodology/approach – The research model with hypothesis development was derived based on the literature. To provide empirical evidence, this study carried out a survey in which the data were equated with a list of questionnaires with a random survey of 380 small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in the Indonesian context. Findings – This study indicates that the use of social media in management process will not affect the increasing firm performance unless the firms build trust upon social networks. The social network with trust allows the firms to gain a pricing capability and a selling capability, which brings a positive impact on firm performance. The results also show that the selling and the pricing capabilities become essential following the utilizing the social media, which concerns on trust building. Research limitations/implications – This study focused on the small-to-medium context, which has conventionally provided an exemplary site for the development of social capital theory but raises issues of generalizability across different contexts. Practical implications – For the managers, it is advisable to encourage their employees to consciously exploit the selling capability by enhancing the business networks via social media to achieve the firm performance. Originality/value – This paper contributes to the social capital theory by explaining the mediating role of trust in the complex relationship between social network and firm performance. This study provides evidence that trust plays a pivotal role in social networks, which enable the observed firms to achieve the performance

Trust and Development : The Deep Structure of Institutions-Building and Socio-Economic Performance

This thesis tries to establish first a comprehensive and realistic theoretical system in which trust changes, and then explores different interesting issues using different methods like comparison analysis, econometric analysis and agent-based modeling. The theoretical system restored in this thesis integrates a series of realistic factors in socio-economic environment besides trust, like information, social learning, network, institutions, geographical mobility and so on, and covers gradually increasing levels from individual thoughts and behavior, to interactions, to networks, and to multi-networks. The underlying logic of linking those realistic factors is: Trust, especially its change, is subject to the perception of trustworthiness. Information reflecting trustworthiness plays a decisive role in trust changing. Not conforming to institutions is an important embodiment of untrustworthiness, and is therefore a significant factor causing distrust. Moreover, trustworthiness per se is an institution. Information process and social learning process overlap to a substantial degree. Ways of acquiring information coincide with that of social learning. Through social learning, behavior can directly be acquired (such as, trustworthy behavior), which makes social learning play an important role in nurturing institution-conforming behavior. What is more, social learning can also change thoughts (such as, change cognition to social environments), and then guides conscious behavior (such as, to trust according to trustworthiness). Information functions through personal psychology eventually. Social networks are where information is acquired, social learning is going on, behavior is output and information is diffused subsequently. Geographical mobility changes individual local interaction network. This thesis contains six sections in total: an introduction and 5 chapters. Chapter 1 is the theoretical part of this thesis. It integrates the factors of trust, information, social learning, network, institutions, geographical mobility, etc. guided by the logic stated above, and basically unfolds along the line of individuals, interactions, networks and multi-networks. It can be viewed as composed of three big plates: first, basics of trust; second, trust and trustworthiness per se; third, other factors mentioned above (namely, information, social learning, network, institutions, geographical mobility) constituting the realistic system where trust changes. Besides, several effects of (dis)trust on economic transactions are discussed in detail. Chapter 2 compares or contrasts or presents several socio-economic aspects of China and three Scandinavian countries - Denmark, Norway and Sweden. The selected socio-economic aspects for comparison or presentation include population, network structures, welfare, equality, geographical mobility, social capital, trust, public security, performance of labor market, and economic growth. Not only the possible logic between these aspects and trust (except trust per se) is explained; rich corresponding data of each aspect of Denmark, Norway, Sweden and China is also presented for a relatively comprehensive understanding of the four countries. Chapter 3 quantitatively, empirically explores the impact of others' norm-conforming behavior, others' opinion and geographical mobility on individual general trust using micro data from Chinese General Social Survey 2013 and the provincial data from the Sixth National Population Census of P.R. China. The empirical research proves evidence for the significant impact of others' norm-conforming behavior, similarity degree of opinion with others and individual geographical mobility on general trust. Chapter 4 explores the evolution of interaction and cooperation, supported by individuals' changing, information-driven trust and trustworthiness respectively, on a directed weighted regular ring using agent-based modeling. Under the experimental design and parameter values selection in this chapter, basically as degree of embeddedness in social network, proportion of high trust agents and probability of information diffusion in neighbors increase and as mutation probability of payoff matrix, conflict of mutated payoff matrix and probability of information diffusion in non-neighbors decrease, simulation performs better. Chapter 5 summarizes and concludes

Unmasking community trust issues in rural field work

The principal objective of this paper is to describe the au thor's fieldwork and research in a remote rural area of South Africa, where a Village Telco is deployed to provide Voice over Internet Protocol on a wireless mesh network. The users' social environment was evaluated to understand trust issues associated with the adoption of the network. Qualita-tive measures such as contextual inquiry, participant obser-vation, focus group and individual interviews were used during data collection. Focus group discussions were held with community members involved with the planning of ways in which to sustain the network. Involving the community gave them a sense of commitment and ownership of the network. To maintain the network, different solutions were proposed. One of these was a billing system for the use of the network. This will be designed to meet users' needs and should also be transparent so that the community will trust it. A prototype is being developed, with input from the community, using open source software to address their requirements.Telkom, Cisco, Aria Technologies, THRIPWeb of Scienc

Strategic Actions in a Platform Context: What Should Facebook Do Next?

This teaching case highlights the complex and unique strategic issues facing social media platform companies, using Facebook as the primary, motivating example. The case centers on the breach of trust that occurred when Cambridge Analytica acquired user data from 87 million Facebook accounts and then attempted to sway the 2016 U.S. Presidential election. The student is immersed in the context of Cambridge Analytica’s violation of user trust and asked to consider the key strategic issues confronting Facebook executives and the company’s ubiquitous platform. Economic concepts of a technology platform, such as network effects, switching costs, and lock-in, as well as overall platform strategy, are considered. Meanwhile, the technological concepts of designing a social media platform that engenders trust – one that balances the conflict between privacy and personalization – are stressed. An optional exercise on the functionality of application programming interfaces (APIs) is also provided. The target courses for the case include Information Systems Strategy, Digital and Social Media Strategy, and Managing Information Systems, at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. While the incidents surrounding Facebook and Cambridge Analytica have become politicized, the teaching case here focuses on the interaction of information systems and business strategy, not directly on the political atmosphere

Social Network Services: Competition and Privacy

Social Network Services (SNS) business models highly depend on the gathering and analyzation of user data to obtain an advantage in competition for advertising clients. Nevertheless, an extensive collection and analysis of this data poses a threat to users’ privacy. Based on an economic perspective it seems rational for Social Network Operators (SNO) to ignore the users’ desire for privacy. However, privacy-friendly services might have the potential to earn users’ trust, leading to an increased revelation of personal data. Addressing these issues, we examine the existing privacy problem in SNS in the context of competition between SNO to investigate whether competition tend to enhance user privacy or whether it is the root of its violation. Therefore, this paper investigates the interconnectedness of the market structure and privacy problems in SNS. After analyzing the users’ and the advertisers’ side of SNS, their competitiveness and its influence on user privacy are examined

Modal Sosial pada Komunitas Suku Toraja di Pekanbaru (Studi Ikatan Kerukunan Keluarga Toraja (Sangtorayan)

The issues discussed in this thesis is the social capital in the Association of Family Harmony Toraja (Sangtorayan) and the efforts to maintain and strengthen social capital in the Association of Family Harmony Toraja (Sangtorayan). The subject of this study was 7 in which four core committee and three active members. Mechanical determination of informants in this research is by using purposive sampling technique. Purposive sampling is a technique of determining the informant to specific purposes only, where there is a tendency of researchers in selecting informants deemed informed and the problem in depth and can be trusted to be a source of data. The method used is qualitative research methods descriptive because this method explained in detail and depth of the issues examined. The theory used the theory of social capital consisting of the elements of trust, social networks and social norms proposed by Putnam. It can be concluded that social capital is very important in a group or organization, trust, social networks and the values and norms have a role in maintaining the relationship and continuity IKKT (Sangtorayan) in Pekanbaru who can be called a metropolitan city. Efforts to maintain and strengthen social capital in IKKT (Sangtorayan) in Pekanbaru is to uphold the values of unity and togetherness in IKKT (Sangtorayan). In maintaining a community or group is to increase social capital in which to build a network, increasing the confidence and discipline to the social norms that specify in an organization

Trustnet: a Trust and Reputation Management System in Distributed Environments

With emerging Internet-scale open content and resource sharing, social networks, and complex cyber-physical systems, trust issues become prominent. Despite their rigorous foundations, conventional network security theories and mechanisms are inadequate at addressing such loosely-defined security issues in decentralized open environments.In this dissertation, we propose a trust and reputation management system architecture and protocols (TrustNet), aimed to define and promote trust as a first-class system parameter on par with communication, computation, and storage performance metrics. To achieve such a breakthrough, we need a fundamentally new design paradigm to seamlessly integrate trust into system design. Our TrustNet initiative represents a bold effort to approach this ultimate goal. TrustNet is built on the top of underlying P2P and mobile ad hoc network layer and provides trust services to higher level applications and middleware. Following the TrustNet architecture, we design, implement, and analyze trust rating, trust aggregation, and trust management strategies. Especially, we propose three trust dissemination protocols and algorithms to meet the urgent needs and explicitly define and formulate end-to-end trust. We formulate trust management problems and propose the H-Trust, VectorTrust, and cTrust scheme to handle trust establishment and aggregation issues. We model trust relations as a trust graph in distributed environment to enhance accuracy and efficiency of trust establishment among peers. Leveraging the distributed Bellman-Ford algorithm, stochastic Markov chain process and H-Index algorithm for fast and lightweight aggregation of trust scores, our scheme are decentralized and self-configurable trust aggregation schemes.To evaluate TrustNet management strategies, we simulated our proposed protocols in both unstructured P2P network and mobile ad hoc network to analyze and simulate trust relationships. We use software generated data as well as real world data sets. Particularly, the student contact patterns on the NUS campus is used as our trust communication model. The simulation results demonstrate the features of trust relationship dissemination in real environments and the efficiency, accuracy, scalability and robustness of the TrustNet system.Computer Science Departmen

TrustHop: Building a Social Trust Network

Undergraduate thesis submitted to the Department of Computer Science and Information Systems, Ashesi University, in partial fulfillment of Bachelor of Science degree in Management Information Systems, May 2022In recent online social networks, each user can often assign a value to their immediate friends level of trustworthiness. Understanding a social trust value between any two nodes in an online social network is beneficial in a range of applications, like online marketing and recommendation systems. However, assessing social trust between two members in an online social network is difficult and time-consuming. This is because existing work either created handcrafted rules based on specialized domain knowledge or required a large number of computational resources, limiting its scalability. Graph-based techniques have recently been proved to be effective at learning from graph data. Even though social trust may be represented as graph data, its advantages have a lot of potential for trust evaluation. Therefore, we begin by reviewing the characteristics of online social networks and the properties of trust. After which the two types of graph-simplification and graph-analogy methodologies would be compared and contrasted as well as their respective problems and obstacles. We then conduct a quick examination of its pre- and post-processes to present an integrated view of trust evaluation. Finally, we discuss some unresolved issues that all trust models face.Ashesi Universit

Network governance and climate change adaptation: collaborative responses to the Queensland floods

Abstract This research examines ways to build adaptive capacity to climate change, through a case study of organisations that participated in the response to Queensland’s major flood disaster in Queensland in 2010/11. The research applied a network governance approach, including social network analysis and qualitative investigations, to the communities of Rockhampton, Emerald and Brisbane. The study was designed to compare social networks across a range of different geographical; functional; and institutional and regulatory contexts.Primary data were obtained from organisations involved in disaster management and water management, through a telephone survey conducted March – September 2012. The network analyses examined collaboration and communication patterns; changes in the network structure from routine management to flood operations; similarities and differences between the geographic regions, and whether collaboration was correlated with trust. A cultural values analysis was then performed to identify the key values of the network actors in each region. Two workshops were conducted in Rockhampton and Brisbane to disseminate the findings to stakeholders, as well as to obtain feedback through group activities.A total of 63 organisations participated in the study. As the network analyses and visualisations indicated that the Rockhampton and Emerald networks were tightly interconnected, a single ‘Central Queensland’ (CQ) network was used for all subsequent analyses. In both Brisbane and CQ, slightly higher levels of collaboration amongst organisations were recorded during flood periods compared with routine operations; and organisations tended to provide, as well as receive, information and/or resources from their collaborators. Overall, both networks appeared to feature high trust, with only a low level of difficult ties (problematic relationships) being reported.The cultural analyses identified patterns of common values amongst participating organisations. In Brisbane, respondents placed a high value on shared information systems and resources; shared communication and language; as well as on collaboration and flexibility. In the CQ network, there was a greater emphasis on local solutions, community wellbeing and longitudinal issues (such as post-disaster supply chains for recovery). The workshop activities suggested that the current structure of Local Disaster Management Groups was heavily influential on broader network participation; and that defining an ‘effective’ disaster response was a complex issue.This study has demonstrated that a network governance approach can provide new ways of understanding the core elements of adaptive capacity, in areas such as enablers and barriers to adaptation, and translating capacity into adaptation. The key implications for policy and practice include the need for stakeholders to drive adaptation to climate change through collaboration and communication; the need for stakeholders to share a common goal and language; the need for better engagement with community, diversity and Indigenous organisations; the need to establish collaboration outside of disaster events; and the need for network governance systems to play an important role in helping to facilitate climate change adaptation. The areas identified for future research included further methodological development and longitudinal studies of social networks, understanding effective modes of communication, and the influence of the changing nature of regional Australian communities on climate change adaptation.Please cite this report as:Kinnear, S, Patison, K, Mann, J, Malone, E, Ross, V 2013, Network governance and climate change adaptation: collaborative responses to the Queensland floods, National Climate Change Adaptation Research Facility, Gold Coast, pp. 113.This research examines ways to build adaptive capacity to climate change, through a case study of organisations that participated in the response to Queensland’s major flood disaster in Queensland in 2010/11. The research applied a network governance approach, including social network analysis and qualitative investigations, to the communities of Rockhampton, Emerald and Brisbane. The study was designed to compare social networks across a range of different geographical; functional; and institutional and regulatory contexts.Primary data were obtained from organisations involved in disaster management and water management, through a telephone survey conducted March – September 2012. The network analyses examined collaboration and communication patterns; changes in the network structure from routine management to flood operations; similarities and differences between the geographic regions, and whether collaboration was correlated with trust. A cultural values analysis was then performed to identify the key values of the network actors in each region. Two workshops were conducted in Rockhampton and Brisbane to disseminate the findings to stakeholders, as well as to obtain feedback through group activities.A total of 63 organisations participated in the study. As the network analyses and visualisations indicated that the Rockhampton and Emerald networks were tightly interconnected, a single ‘Central Queensland’ (CQ) network was used for all subsequent analyses. In both Brisbane and CQ, slightly higher levels of collaboration amongst organisations were recorded during flood periods compared with routine operations; and organisations tended to provide, as well as receive, information and/or resources from their collaborators. Overall, both networks appeared to feature high trust, with only a low level of difficult ties (problematic relationships) being reported.The cultural analyses identified patterns of common values amongst participating organisations. In Brisbane, respondents placed a high value on shared information systems and resources; shared communication and language; as well as on collaboration and flexibility. In the CQ network, there was a greater emphasis on local solutions, community wellbeing and longitudinal issues (such as post-disaster supply chains for recovery). The workshop activities suggested that the current structure of Local Disaster Management Groups was heavily influential on broader network participation; and that defining an ‘effective’ disaster response was a complex issue.This study has demonstrated that a network governance approach can provide new ways of understanding the core elements of adaptive capacity, in areas such as enablers and barriers to adaptation, and translating capacity into adaptation. The key implications for policy and practice include the need for stakeholders to drive adaptation to climate change through collaboration and communication; the need for stakeholders to share a common goal and language; the need for better engagement with community, diversity and Indigenous organisations; the need to establish collaboration outside of disaster events; and the need for network governance systems to play an important role in helping to facilitate climate change adaptation. The areas identified for future research included further methodological development and longitudinal studies of social networks, understanding effective modes of communication, and the influence of the changing nature of regional Australian communities on climate change adaptation