Social Network and Content Analysis: An Integrated Methodology to Investigate a Global Community Evolution

The present study describes an Integrated Methodology developed combining Social Network and Content Analysis approaches, to investigate the organizational mechanisms responsible for the creation of Social Capital within Communities. The methodological integration is proposed to overcome one of the main limitations of Social Network Analysis (SNA): the analysis of the content of the information flows and the organizational and cultural aspects of their exchanges. The methodological framework was able to differentiate the “ties” among community members on the basis of the subject matter of the information flows. It showed its reliability for Project-oriented Virtual Communities to discover and draw the development path of their projects, from the new idea generation to the project outcome delivery, through the content “tagging” of the information flows. It is suitable to describe the main characteristics of a project-oriented community, useful and effective to monitor the processes developed within the community

Selective memories favor Influentials

Social scientists have long been interested in understanding what makes some respondents more accurate observers of their own social networking behavior than others in recalling and reporting social network’s structure (Bernard et al. 1984, Freeman et al, 1987, Casciaro, 1998). This study contributes to social network research on interpersonal perception accuracy, by focusing on the relationship between actors’ centrality and their ability to report accurately their own social interactions. We used network measures like actors’ betweenness centrality and degree centrality to identify the most prominent members. This research was conducted within a graduate school of management that both educates students and undertakes research projects. Through seven web surveys, we gathered data on the frequency of interaction among members connected through telephone, chat, and face-to-face conversations. We conducted focused interviews with three senior managers to classify all network members according to three factors: trustworthiness, prestige, and contribution. We applied an “internal measure of accuracy” by measuring the correlation between ego-perception and alter-perception. We found that actors involved on the same interaction attributed different values to the same interaction (Riji ≠ Rjij), which is referred to as a “non-reciprocity” type of misalignment (Krackhardt, 1987). We found a positive correlation between actors’ centrality and their centrality as assessed by senior management, and a negative correlation between actors’ centrality and their accuracy in recalling interactions. These asymmetries suggest that underreporting social interactions may represent a third way of measuring the importance of members and finding the most influential ones

How KM 2.0 Supports Remote Cross-Cultural Learning Communities

Abstract: This paper describes how a combination of face-to-face and distance work can be supported by a social computing environment in a remote, multicultural and multidisciplinary community. We focused on the project-based learning approach facilitated by web 2.0 solutions. Collaboration with colleagues in virtual teams is facilitated by the use of traditional and new technologies: e-mail, chat, blogs, Wikis, and VoIP. This paper attempts to answer this question: how can KM 2.0 systems assist in the educational process of an international, multidisciplinary, dispersed learning community? To address this, we have designed a project-based learning approach supported by an integrated Social Computing Environment. This experiment involves a community of 40 learners from Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt and Jordan involved in the IMeBM Master’s Degree Program. The learners were physically located in both Italy and in their home countries throughout the program’s classroom, project and internship phases. This study suggests that KM 2.0 tools can facilitate remote cross-cultural education, collaboration and knowledge sharing between educational stakeholders. The use of KM 2.0 technologies increases and speeds up the acquisition of learners’ competencies and skills and allows supervisors to monitor the knowledge acquisition and knowledge sharing processes, thus improving collaborative learning and groups’ communication within the Master’s extended community

9th International Collaborative Innovation Networks (COINs) Conference

This volume is focused on the emerging concept of Collaborative Innovation Networks (COINs). COINs are at the core of collaborative knowledge networks, distributed communities taking advantage of the wide connectivity and the support of communication technologies, spanning beyond the organizational perimeter of companies on a global scale. The book presents the refereed conference papers from the 7th International Conference on COINs, October 8-9, 2019, in Warsaw, Poland. It includes papers for both application areas of COINs, (1) optimizing organizational creativity and performance, and (2) discovering and predicting new trends by identifying COINs on the Web through online social media analysis. Papers at COINs19 combine a wide range of interdisciplinary fields such as social network analysis, group dynamics, design and visualization, information systems and the psychology and sociality of collaboration, and intercultural analysis through the lens of online social media. They will cover most recent advances in areas from leadership and collaboration, trend prediction and data mining, to social competence and Internet communication

Improving Knowledge Handling by Building Intelligent Systems Using Social Agent Modelling

Any purposeful organization can be understood as a value network. The main goal of this network is to deliver the highest value from the interdependencies between nodes. Improvement in this domain requires to increase efficiency, response time, knowledge availability and knowledge storing. One of the most interesting research topics in the field of multi-agent systems is the definition of models with the aim of representing social structures such as organizations and coalitions, to control the emergent behaviour of open systems. This paper presents an approach to capture knowledge from social environment by building new features in the social network analysis systems and use this knowledge as a source for modelling multi-agent systems. This paper presents a different approach to capture knowledge from social environment and handle social aspects in intelligent analysis systems by developing and simulating agent’s behaviour. Those proposed methods will help to represent knowledge in a new way as well as simulate and automate knowledge flow

ORGANIZATIONAL STRUCTURES AND COMMUNICATIONS MEDIA: A SOCIAL NETWORK PERSPECTIVE

Members of organizations interact using many modes of communication. Interactions are the base for a daily knowledge flow. Knowledge run on many patterns, some of them are formal and based on the official structure of the organization while others are informal and based on individual and organizational structures. This paper examines how the ties obtained by mining emails archives are different by interactions that occur by using other modes of communication. We compared social network properties of both the network implied by email and the network implied by four of the most used modes of communication by two communities of faculty, researchers and students within a school of management. The communication modes mainly adopted were face-to-face interactions, instant messaging, phone and email. The first community was made up of 52 members whose roles were representative of the entire organizational structure. The second community was made up of “contributors and coordinators” and was a sub-set of the first community. Whereas for the former we monitored only email exchanges, for the latter we took into consideration all the information and knowledge flowing through the whole set of communication modes adopted. We found that email network is different from network implied by other media with reference both to the average use of different media and to actors’ betweeness centrality. The results of this study show how formal and informal structures cohabit in a complex organization and are reflected by a composite set of modes of communication, rather than by the mere exchange of email. By showing some of the email’s biases in approximating the complete social ties, we aimed at creating a parallelism between email and formal information flow from one side versus other modes of communication (face-to-face, instant messaging and phone) and informal working ties from the other side

Inter-organizational communities as the emerging organizational form: empirical evidence from different industries

This paper explores the importance of nurturing informal inter-organizational communities. Supported by real cases of informal communities created in different industries, this paper describes communities as a flexible answer to the growing uncertainty of the business landscape. We combined and applied methodologies of Social Network Analysis and Content Analysis to understand the communities’ structure and their evolution over time. We based our research on a multiple case study exploring the informal communities nurtured by a multinational consulting company and two US-based Swiss Consulates. We gathered data through web-surveys, from archival data (e-mail archives) and direct observation/interviews to key individuals. We conclude that successful informal communities emerge in presence of a core group of individuals acting as energizers of the community