Saturday, October 10, 2009

Interactive Paper Session Two

3:45 pm – 4:45 pm

Learning to Collaborate in COINs: An Instructors’ Point of View

Christine Miller, Savannah College of Art and Design  |  Peter Gloor, MIT Center for Collective Intelligence  |  Kai Fischbach, University of Cologne  |  Julia Gluesing, Wayne State University

The purpose of this paper is to describe COINS (Collaborative Online Innovation Networks), a collaborative venture between information systems and computer science faculty and students from MIT, the University of Cologne, the University of Helsinki, and design students from SCAD during the 2008 fall term. The COINS class was conceived as a way to provide students with opportunities to learn through experience how to communicate in a multicultural, multinational, and multidisciplinary environment. Adding to the challenge is the fact that all interaction takes place virtually.

Students in the COINS course used an automated form of social network analysis to uncover and predict trends in business, collaborative ventures, and in consumer attitudes and behavior. Employing an array of web-based communication tools they engaged in team projects ranging from a study of online betting forums to research on changing attitudes towards animals for a major Swiss retailer. Each team was required to collect data from digital sources that included blogs, wikis, email, and online groups and forums. Analysis was conducted using Condor software. Often additional programming was required to collect or manipulate data.

This was the first time a group of design students was invited to join the COINS class to work with students from information systems and computer science. Insights and learning occurred across multiple dimensions, which were highlighted in the 3 assessments that were conducted during the project. For design management students who were in the minority this experience in learning to collaborate with non-designers meant learning how to communicate the value of design principles, processes, and practices. At the same time it meant learning to rely on the knowledge, skills, and capabilities of others outside one’s field. The paper explores the lessons learned through this cross-disciplinary, cross-cultural experiment in team-based collaboration and experiential learning in the global virtual environment.

Exploring Illuminative Systems in Informal Networks of Adults

Amy K. Scatliff, Educational Leadership and Change, (Ed.D.) Fielding Graduate University

Are hard-to-define sensations such as synchronicity, love, wholeness, and appreciation part of a pattern or illuminative system that is connected to a larger ecological network or evolutionary design meant to establish homeostasis within the planet? The metaphorical illuminative system that evolved from this question is inspired by the evolutionary, social theories of Jared Diamond and Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela’s theory of autopoiesis (self-making), in which living systems organize themselves into increasingly more diverse complexity to establish homeostasis. This paper describes an exploratory study in which the metaphor of an illuminative system was introduced to prompt adults to engage in informal, networked learning exchanges and encounters through a seven-step process. Meeting with groups in person or online and posting to an interactive website, adults in this study track, record and describe in laymen terms their everyday encounters with illumination. Illumination in this sense could encompass both spiritual and/or secular significance. Participants build data files of illuminative sensation recorded in video, text, soundbite, drawing, and/or journaling. This spatial and sensory awareness activity, initiating from an appreciative base, eventually leads to participants conducting informal skillshares where adults teach to one another the strengths they possess when illuminated. Next adults collectively design new courses, programs, and products for their immediate community. After qualitative analysis of the data, the following preliminary findings emerged: 1) A majority of adults in the study expressed interest in having more opportunities for sharing about illuminative moments with one another; 2) Participants were surprised and interested in the differences of how they interpreted illuminative perception; they found it was enlightening to reflect upon internally and to discuss with others; 3) Sensing, recording and discussing illuminative perceptions takes time and emotional investment for some participants, especially those inhibited by depressive or anxious behavioral pattern.

Too Much E-Mail Decreases Job Satisfaction

Frank Merten, University of Cologne  |  Peter Gloor, MIT Center for Collective Intelligence

This paper investigates positive and negative e-mail usage patterns and its influence on job satisfaction by modeling e-mail interaction as communication in social networks. In this project we analyze the knowledge flow at a medium sized company in a German speaking country. We obtained the full e-mail archive of this firm in the services sector with about fifty employees. The archive covers a twelve-month period of major reorganization at the company, which had been totally restructured. We also calculated e-mail responsiveness to gain further insight into the individual communication behavior, by including the average response time (ART) to e-mail and conducted an individual job satisfaction survey.

A negative correlation between job satisfaction and network betweenness centrality of teams was found. We explain this by the fact that teams, which are central in the communication network of an organization, suffer from information overload. High betweenness of individuals and ART were positively correlated, which means that the higher betweenness of an individual, the slower she/he is in answering e-mails. Results therefore indicate that central network position reduces e-mail responsiveness, while this position in the organization’s social network also seems to be correlated with lower job satisfaction. We also found that the more e-mail a team sends and receives, the lower its satisfaction rating.

Further we investigated if we could identify high performers both by betweenness and individual questioning. Comparing the social network position of an actor in the total network and in the internal network offered insights about the role of the actor in the organization, because key individuals usually occupy central positions in both the internal and total network. As it is in the best interest of a company to have e-mails answered quickly, a company might specifically target central employees and assist them in dealing with potential communication overload.

Analyzing the Creative Editing Behavior of Wikipedia Editors Through Dynamic Social Network Analysis

Takashi Iba  |  Keiichi Nemoto  |  Bernd Peters  |  Peter Gloor, MIT Center for Collective Intelligence

This paper analyzes editing patterns of Wikipedia contributors using dynamic social network analysis. We have developed a tool that converts the edit flow among contributors into a temporal social network. We are using this approach to identify the most creative Wikipedia editors among the few thousand contributors who make most of the edits amid the millions of active Wikipedia editors. In particular, we identify the key category of “coolfarmers”, the prolific authors starting and building new articles of high quality. Towards this goal we analyzed the 2580 featured articles of the English Wikipedia where we found two main article types: (1) articles of narrow focus created by a few subject matter experts, and (2) articles about a broad topic created by thousands of interested incidental editors. We then investigated the authoring process of articles about a current and controversial event. There we found two types of editors with different editing patterns: the mediators, trying to reconcile the different viewpoints of editors, and the zealots, who are adding fuel to heated discussions on controversial topics. As a second category we look at the “egoboosters”, people who use Wikipedia mostly to showcase themselves. Understanding these different patterns of behavior gives important insights about the cultural norms of online creators. In addition, identifying and policing egoboosters has the potential to increase the quality of Wikipedia. People who are best suited to enforce culture‐compliant behavior of egoboosters through exemplary behavior and active intervention are the highly regarded coolfarmers.

Dynamics of Individual Knowledge Sharing Behavior in a Chinese P2P Network

Zhang Lun   |  Jonathan Zhu Jianhua, City University of Hong Kong

The current study examined peoples’ knowledge sharing behavior in a Chinese P2P network Maze. Both the number of nodes and edges in Maze is relative stable from Oct 2008 to May 2009. Besides, there is a highly positive correlation between the number of nodes and edges (r = .82, p < .05); while the average clustering coefficients is negatively correlated with either the number of nodes (r = -.70, p = .05) or the number of edges (r = -.83, p = .01). To further explore the dynamics of downloading and uploading times in Maze, users in Maze were categorized to three groups: dual player, altruists and free-riders. Dual players refer to those who both uploaded and downloaded from Maze in the given period; while altruists means that users only uploaded files but without downloading behavior; contrary to altruists, free-riders indicate that users only downloaded from Maze and refused to upload.

The data shows that the frequency distribution of downloading and uploading times in the three groups all followed the power-law distribution, which means that the majority rarely downloaded or uploaded and a small fraction of users downloaded or uploaded frequently. The current study also zoomed in the dual-player to explore their dynamic of knowledge sharing behavior by measuring the ratio of downloading to uploading times. It is found that the frequency distribution of ratio of downloading to uploading times could be fitted with quadratic distribution.

Mapping communities in large virtual social networks: Using Twitter data to find the Indie Mac community

Michael van Meeteren  |  Ate Poorthuis  |  Elenna Dugundji, Department of Geography, Planning and International Development Studies, Universiteit van Amsterdam

This paper describes a method to delineate a “real world” community of practice from a large N dataset derived from the social networking site Twitter. The starting point is previous qualitative research of a virtual community of independent developers who create software for Apple’s Macintosh and iPhone platforms. “Indie” developers have been active on Twitter from an early stage on and they use Twitter to sustain interactions between peers, exchange technical information and viral “echo chamber” marketing. The publicly available Twitter API is used to mine a network consisting of several million edges. Through several pruning methods this network is sized down to a large network containing roughly 1 million edges. A fast greedy algorithm is used to detect subgraphs within this large network. Triangulation with qualitative data proves that the fast greedy algorithm is able to distill meaningful communities from a large, noisy and ill-delineated network. The accuracy of this method gives rise to the discussion of the value for businesses and market research since it offers opportunities to identify and monitor target audiences at a finely grained level. However, we should be wary of the serious consequences with regard to privacy and ethics. The proposed method allows micro level inferences from a macro dataset of which the subject might be completely unaware. The method can have consequences for the anonymity of key persons behind the scenes of social and political movements or any other communities of which members are active on Twitter or other social networks.

Networking Analysis of Change: Social Simulation in University Courses

Lukas Zenk, Danube University Krems, Krems an der Donau, Austria

The information exchange between employees forms social structures that change over time, but the emerged relational patterns typically remian hidden even though they provide a valuable resource to optimize collaboration between employees. The analysis of networks and the use of network analysis as an intervention toll are promising fields for organizational studies and business applications.