1 research outputs found
Using Key Player Analysis as a Method for Examining the Role of Community Animators in Technology Adoption
This paper examines the role of community animators in technology adoption.
Community animators are individuals that actively build social networks and
broker ties between nodes in those networks. The present study observes
technology adoption patterns through data collected from a mobile application
at a local arts festival. A social network was constructed through
photo-sharing and interaction within the app. Given this data, we propose the
use of key player analysis to identify community animators. In addition, we use
a graph invariant (i.e., fragmentation in the network) to describe the role and
impact of key players on the full network of interactions. Our results
contribute to literature on technology adoption in usability studies by
proposing a method to quantify and identify the theoretical concept of
community animators. We further analyze the types of community animators to be
found in early adoption of technology: the early adopters themselves, and the
initiating developers.Comment: 10 pages, 10 figures, 4 table