Conversations on Innovation, Power and Responsibility with Jeff Ubois

09FebMay 7, 2015 By Marc Smith

My good friend and colleague Jeff Ubois recently edited and released a volume entitled Conversations on Innovation, Power and Responsibility for the Fondazione Giannino Bassetti. Some of my comments on the topic of innovation from a conversation with Jeff are included in the volume which collects a wide range of thoughts about the nature and consequence of technical change.

Table Of Contents

Foreword
Introduction
About the Question
Related Concepts
Choosing Subjects: Where Does Responsibility Matter Now?

Genetics And Healthcare
Thomas Murray, The Hastings Center
Ignacio Chapela: Drawing a Boundary Around the Lab
Arthur Caplan: Innovation as Politics
David Magnus & Mildred Cho: True Fictions

Nanotechnology
Christine Peterson: Nanotechnology and Enhancement
Lawrence Gasman: Nanomarkets

Robotics And Computing
Ronald Arkin: Embedding Values in Machines
Jeff Jonas: Applying the UN declaration of human rights
Marc Smith: Invention, mitigation, accounting and externalities
Mikko Ahonen: Open Innovation … and Radiation Safety

Design
Roberto Verganti: Varieties of Design Innovation
Michael Twidale: IRBs, Design, Empowerment,
Accountability, Sustainability

My comments from the volume are after the fold…

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Slides: NodeXL overview: social media network analysis

17DecMay 7, 2015 By Marc Smith

Here is a recent slidedeck that provides an overview of NodeXL and social media network analysis.

2009 December NodeXL Overview

View more presentations from Marc Smith.

The deck illustrates the use of NodeXL to extract several social media networks from systems like twitter and facebook to generate maps of communities and identify people and objects in key locations.

Video: Panel Discussion from November 19: Using Social Media to Grow and Market Your Business

13DecMay 7, 2015 By Marc Smith

Video is now available from a panel hosted by the Women’s Affinity Group of O’Melveny & Myers’ Silicon Valley Office in Menlo Park on November 19th. Along with Karla Spormann, President and CEO Tendo Communications, Martin Eberhard, Co-founder and former CEO Tesla Motors, Patrick Ewers, Founder, Mindmavin LLC. We spoke about “Using Social Media to Grow and Market Your Business”.

We discussed ways to leverage social networks networks beyond personal connections – to provide business value. We talked about ways to efficiently and effectively use social media to market and grow your business.

Using social media to grow and market your business

I spoke about tools, like NodeXL, that we have been building that create maps of the relationships among a population of people gathered by some shared attribute, like mentioning a keyword or hashtag.

Here are a few excerpts from the event created by Tendo Communications:

Book: Online Deliberation: Design, Research, and Practice

13DecMay 7, 2015 By Marc Smith

The Second Conference on Online Deliberation: Design, Research, and Practice (OD2005/DIAC-2005) was held at Stanford University May 20-22, 2005. From that event there is now a book, Online Deliberation: Design, Research, and Practice, edited by Todd Davies and Seeta Peña Gangadharan (CSLI Publications, November 2009). All content in the book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

I will call out a few of the many interesting chapters, one of which I contributed to:

Chapter 5: Friends, Foes, and Fringe: Norms and Structure in Political Discussion Networks (John Kelly, Danyel Fisher, and Marc Smith, pp. 83-93)

And two from colleagues who report on tools for facilitating political debate and decision making:

Chapter 6: Searching the Net for Differences of Opinion (Warren Sack, John Kelly, and Michael Dale, pp. 95-104)

Chapter 26: Online Civic Deliberation with E-Liberate (Douglas Schuler, pp. 293-302)

The book is a great guide to the many ways computer-mediated interaction technologies are being used to build consensus or tear it apart!

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Workshop December 15th: Create your own twitter social network map

28NovMay 7, 2015 By Marc Smith

On December 15th in Mountain View, California join me for lunch and a workshop on creating social media network diagrams! We will provide a hands-on guide to creating maps of the collections of connections among people who tweet about various brands, topics, events, and concepts. Bring your own Windows/Office 2007 machine and we will set you up with the free and open NodeXL and help you create a map yourself of the topic of your choice.

Registration: http://smanalysistwitter.eventbrite.com/

For example, this is a map of the population of people who recently mentioned “NodeXL” in Twitter.

I see a large cluster of French speaking people who recently picked up on a tweet:

seekoeur: [Blog] Identifier des communautés et cartographier des relations sur Twitter avec NodeXL http://www.seekoeur.com/?p=854

This is a very distinct group from the second cluster around my own account and the recently created NodeXL twitter account.

In contrast, this is the map of all the people who mentioned the keyword “SharePoint” recently in Twitter.

This is clearly a much larger population and one with a dense core of highly connected individuals. A number of peripheral groups surround the core. Drilling in can reveal who the center of the center of the network is, a potentially highly influential person.

Social Media Talks at Aachen University, December 7th & 8th

28NovMay 7, 2015 By Marc Smith

After visiting the Oxford Internet Institute on December 4th, I will be visiting Aachen University to talk about social media network analysis this December 7th and 8th.

I will be visiting with my hosts, Zinayida Petrushyna and Ralf Klamma who have been doing insightful work exploring social media sites like Media Wikis and Wikipedia. The Wiki Watcher project is a big favorite of mine. Their working group on Social Network Analysis on Dynamic Digital Networks is of particular interest.

While I am back in Aachen, I hope I will get to see some of the folks I met at the “European Microsoft Innovation Center” (EMIC) located there. They focus on research into embedded systems which I see as having vast implications for the ways computers sense social relationships. When sociologically aware machines are widely used, we will have new ways of building and maintaining relationships.

I will give three presentations over two days in Aachen – I hope you can attend if you are in the area!

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Monday, December 7, 2009 (in cooperation with the Web Science II course at RWTH Aachen University):

12:15 – 13:45 Social Media Visualization Analysis: overview of work to visualize social media using treemaps, histograms, scatterplots and social network diagrams

Using social media makes evidence of social relationships into machine readable data streams. The resulting data sets contain time series, hierarchy, and network data structures that can be visualized to illustrate the range of variation in social media data spaces and participants. Histograms, line charts, treemaps, and network diagrams can be used in concert to illuminate the many facets of behavior and population present in social media spaces. Resulting images illustrate the range of variation of individual and collective formations in social media spaces.

16:00 – 17:30 NodeXL – A hands-on guide: a workshop style review of sample data sets that are processed through NodeXL operations to generate metrics and a visualization that tells a story.

As social media networks proliferate there is a growing need for tools to manage, analyze, and visualize network graphs. NodeXL is an add-in for Office 2007 that provides social network diagram and analysis tools in the context of a spreadsheet application. Adding the directed graph chart type to Excel opens up many possibilities for easily manipulating networks and controlling their display properties. In this workshop the steps needed to install and productively operate NodeXL for Office 2007 are reviewed. The free and open NodeXL add-in provides directed graph charting features within Excel, allowing users to create node-link diagrams with control over each node and edge color, size, transparency and shape without requiring the use of a command line interface or programming language. Since NodeXL builds within Excel, all of the controls and programmatic features of Office are available. Additional features of NodeXL generate social networks from social media data sources like personal e-mail (drawing data from the Windows Desktop Search engine) and the Twitter social network micro-blogging system. Arbitrary edge lists (anything that can be pasted into Excel) can be visualized and analyzed in NodeXL. This session will provide a walk through the basic operation of NodeXL.

Tuesday, December 8, 2009

10:00 – 11:00 In the future my phone will notice your phone: from ephemeral to archival societies

New sources of data from everyday life are being captured and recorded with mobile devices, creating a new stream of archival material that is richer than all but the most obsessively observed biographies. Many organizations are adopting social media and creating data sets that map their internal social network structure as an accidental by-product. Studying these data is sets is a focus of growing interest. Research projects like SenseCam are now becoming products and services like nTag, Spotme, Fire Eagle, and Google Lattitude using devices like iPhone and G1 are weaving location into every application. When my phone notices your phone a new set of mobile social software applications become possible that capture data about other people as they beacon their identifies to one another. Additional sensors will collect medical data to improve our health and safety, as early adopters in the “Quantified Self” movement make clear. Social media systems are being linked to one another to enable cascades of events from a single message as status updates are passed among Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and blogs automatically aggregate the results of searches and post articles that themselves may trigger other events. Taking a photo or updating a status message can now set off a series of unpredictable events. The result will be lives that are more publicly displayed than ever before. Add potential improvements in audio and facial recognition and a new world of continuous observation and publication emerges. Some benefits, like those displayed by the Google Flu tracking system, illustrate the potential for insight from aggregated sensor data. Risks include more efficient state and corporate surveillance and self-imposed censorship.

Oxford Internet Institute: Forum on Relationships and the Internet December 4th

28NovMay 7, 2015 By Marc Smith

On December 4th, I will be attending the Oxford Internet Institute‘s Forum on Relationships and the Internet which will feature researchers focused on computer-mediated relationships. Rather than being used primarily to access information, people often use networked computing to access people, creating or sustaining relationships with others. There are many ways in which the Internet and a range of applications are now used to find new people, find old people, maintain primary connections, sustain weak ties, and build personal and professional relationships. Dating sites are a clear part of the Internet relationship picture but so are professional “dating” services like LinkedIn or professional services directories like Craig’s List, social networking services like Facebook, and “normal” tools like email. People now use a concerted set of Internet tools in building and maintaining their relationships.

Researchers are interested in online dating and social networking. They are now exploring the role of information and communication technologies in all forms of interpersonal relationships. Practitioners from a growing and international relationship industry who want to cultivate and manage these relationship systems will attend along with policy-makers who seek to regulate their uses towards positive ends and avoid abuses.

Speakers include:

Bill Dutton, Oxford Internet Institute
Nai Li, Oxford Internet Institute
Bernie Hogan, Oxford Internet Institute
Ellen Helsper, London School of Economics
Monica Whitty, Nottingham-Trent University
Barry Wellman, University of Toronto and Director of NetLab
Joe Walther, Michigan State University
Nicole Ellison, Michigan State University

Research in Internet relationships goes beyond a focus on dating sites and services to incorporate all the stages and types of relationships being shaped by social information technology. My demonstration will illustrate the ways NodeXL can map relationships in a variety of social media spaces, including YouTube, flickr, email, twitter, and (with the help of Bernie Hogan’s ego-network importer) Facebook. These maps can be a useful ways of distinguishing different kinds of relationship patterns present in these spaces, identifying key participants who acts as hubs or bridges.

The OII also maintains a video webcast site with a great collection of recordings of lectures and panel discussions of a variety of topics related to the Internet and society. In particular, check out Duncan Watts presenting a talk on “Using the Web to do Social Science“.

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Elinor Ostrom wins the 2009 Nobel Prize for Economics

12OctMay 7, 2015 By Marc Smith

Professor Elinor Ostrom has been awarded the Nobel prize in Economics for her work on common pool resources (CPRs) and the management of shared resources. Her work has great relevance for understanding the creation of many public goods on the internet. She teaches at Indiana University where she is Arthur F. Bentley Professor of Political Science, Co-Director, Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis, Professor of Public and Environmental Affairs, Part-Time, Co-Director, Center for the Study of Institutions, Population, and Environmental Change.

http://books.google.com/books?id=v4A39158MUQC

At the core of her extensive, empirical, research into the ways humans share common goods and resources is a set of eight core design principles. These “8” principles for successful creation and consumption of a resource are documented in the book “Governing the Commons”

Mobile Web Africa – October 13-14, 2009, Johannesburg, South Africa

05OctMay 7, 2015 By Marc Smith

Next week I will be attending and discussing mobile social media and social networks at the Mobile Web Africa conference in Johannesburg, South Africa. It is my first time to Africa and I am excited to both visit and to discuss how mobile networked devices can change social organizations. Mobile devices are in many ways more important in emerging and developing regions where the availability of these tools enable the first voice and data services that have ever been affordable and reliable, let alone mobile. There are vast opportunities in this space, a topic well reviewed in the recent issue of the Economist:

The Mobile Web Africa event will focus on these key questions:

How will the industry evolve to a point where the vast majority of people have access to the mobile web and the content they want to view?
How will the industry fully exploit existing and future opportunities?
How can PC or mobile based developers and start-ups monetise their innovation and creativity to grow in to companies that will drive the expansion of the ecosystem?
How can Operators, Original Equipment Manufacturers, global associations and other mobile powerhouses assist their smaller partners?
How can societal and economic problems be tackled by the development of the capabilities of the mobile device?
What handsets, standards, networks and designs will allow consumers to successfully access the content and consume it?
How will the consumer be able to discover that content – through an Application, Browser, Search Engine, Advert, Social Network?

I will focus my discussion on the idea of the “Electrification of the Interaction Order” and topics related to the growing use of sensors on mobile devices and the sharing of the resulting data. A service like SenseNetworks is a good example of a mobile data collection, analysis, and presentation service. Other sites, like Quantified Self, CureTogether, and FitBit, are examples of the social movements, web applications, and devices that are emerging in the self-monitoring medical tracking space. These communities overlap with the trail based exercise communities of runners, bikers, skaters, hikers, and skiers, some with artistic inclinations. I see a new wave of devices that are extensively quantify your “self” and “others”, perhaps when people swap sensor data with one another. The recent work of Nathan Eagle and his co-authors illustrate the possibilities of using many devices with (already existing and widely used) sensors can generate remarkable maps of human behavior. Much of this data will take the form of social networks as people are linked by “hyperties” – forms of association and connection that are authored by machines from the records of association and behavior. People will be linked who have never met, in the same way that web book store customers who have never met can be linked by common browse and purchase patterns. Hyperties will be formed by shared use of location, even if at different times, or patterns created by passing through different spaces at different times but in common patterns (Starbucks, then gas? Or subway then tea shop?). The notion of “Tribes” used by the SenseNetworks company is a good example of this approach. The Economist is all over this topic, with another article “Mobile phones Sensors and sensitivity” that captures the topic. Jonathan Donner’s work is also a good resource for insights on the role of mobile technology in many parts of the world. The ability to enable a form of banking service is a particular benefit for the many people who do not have access to banking services.

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Social Media Network Analysis Workshop – October 29th in Mountain View, CA

27SepMay 7, 2015 By Marc Smith

The network created by “Who follows who among the people who tweeted “#CHI2010”. Node size is proportional to total tweets. Generated with NodeXL

On October 29th, I will be offering a workshop in Mountain View, California on the application of social network analysis to the measurement of social media.

The workshop will run from 9m to 4pm and include hands-on exercises using real world social media data sets and the free and open NodeXL social network analysis add-in for Excel 2007. We will create social network metrics and visualizations from personal email, twitter, facebook, and message board records to reveal the broad outline of a community, its various kinds of leaders and active participants, major cliques and clusters, and pivotal events.

The workshop will make use of the NodeXL tutorial:
http://casci.umd.edu/NodeXL_Teaching

Registration at:
http://www.eventbrite.com/event/386418789

I will post the slides for those who cannot attend, but the live event will allow me to help those interested in learning how to visualize social media networks and generate and interpret social network metrics. What’s an “eigenvector centrality”? Come find out why that number highlights special people in a network and how to calculate it on your own network data sets. Find experts, identify the people who are most heavily connected, and key contributors. If you plan to attend, it would be great if you bring sample data: any edge list or matrix is fine. We can plot and measure sample data participants bring along with them.

I will demonstrate how to create twitter network maps like the one above which shows networks of follows connections among a group of people who tweeted the string “#CHI2010” (as returned by search.twitter.com). You can make your own twitter maps with NodeXL! Similar maps can be made with a user name. In the workshop we will be sure to make a twitter network for anyone there who tweets.

Upon completion of this workshop, participants will:
* be able to understand the basics of SNA, its terminology and background.
* be able to transform communication data (e.g. Twitter, email, flickr, message boards etc.) into network data.
* understand the different possible presentations of social networks, e.g. in a matrix or a sociogram.
* apply network metrics and visualizations to find clusters and key contributors in real world social media data sets.
* get familiar with the use of standard SNA tools and software in general and the NodeXL social network analysis add-in for Excel in particular.
* be able to derive practical and useful information through SNA analysis that would help design an innovative and successful online community.

Who should attend? People interested in community management, social media monitoring and marketing, knowledge management, collaboration and human resources, legal discovery, organizational behavior and management

Registration.

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