Uptown

(Crossposted at Complexity and Social Networks Blog)

Ines Mergel, David Lazer and I have a paper out in the International Journal of Learning and Change on voluntary engagement in knowledge sharing. Based on data from our study of forensic scientists in government crime labs, we investigated why individuals make the time and effort to answer questions directed at them. In a multi-level framework we identify several influencing factors at the individual, relational, group, and informational level. Here's the abstract:

Knowledge is essential for the functioning of every social system, especially for professionals in knowledge-intensive organisations. Since individuals do not possess all the work-related knowledge that they require, they turn to others in search for that knowledge. While prior research has mainly focused on antecedents and consequences of knowledge sharing and understanding why people do not share knowledge, less is known why people provide knowledge, and what conditions trigger voluntary engagement in knowledge sharing. Our article addresses this gap by proposing a multi-level framework for voluntary engagement in knowledge sharing: individual, relational, group, and informational. We provide illustrations from a particular knowledge-intensive community, DNA forensic scientists who work at public laboratories.

A pdf version is available from the Inderscience website.

(Crossposted at Complexity and Social Networks Blog)

This hardly comes as a surprise: Corporations are increasingly tapping into the social capital of networks such as Facebook and MySpace, as reported in this NY Times article by Laurie J. Flynn today. From a theoretical standpoint, it makes a lot of sense: The ties in these online social networks reflect several layers of homophily (friendship, common interests, membership in various groups, partially self-selected affiliation, etc.) in addition to what usually applies to even the best organizational communities of practice. Several companies are now integrating business intelligence applications with the social Web and the Internet. Such "interrelated pools of information" bring value to business, says Flynn, mainly by fostering communication among employees, but also by better identifying job candidates and target customers. Let's just hope that Facebook will react to this development and allow the creation of different profiles for the various personae we represent on the Internet.

The article appeared in a special section of the New York Times today called "Tech Innovation". The section is filled to the brim with exciting and innovative ideas - one of these coming from the ever resourceful Bernardo Huberman of HP Labs. Together with his team he developed the prediction markets tool "Brain" (Behaviorally Robust Aggregation of Information in Networks), which can be employed to predict the demand of a new service, such as Internet television. I loved Huberman's quote a propos his brainchild: "We want to reduce the wisdom of crowds to the wisdom of 12 or 13 people." Hopefully the right ones.

Sto notando una mia tendenza di auto censurare il racconto delle solite storielle quotidiane, chiaramente legata alla mia recente scoperta che questo blog viene letto da gente di cui proprio non me l'aspettavo...

Comunque sia, questa storia mi fa troppo ridere e quindi la racconto. Quando prendiamo la metropolitana con Ele spesso ci tocca aspettare a lungo (dal punto di vista di una bimba piccina) e quindi ci inventiamo vari giochi. Quello preferito di Ele e' di fissare i binari con gli occhi finche' vediamo un ratto. Ora ogni volta che scendiamo in metro, Ele chiede tutta agitata: "Dov'e' il ratto?" Ah i piccoli piaceri della vita newyorchese.

Just found this quote by Dana Carvey:

"I'm thirty years old, but I read at the thirty-four-year-old level."

From Jeffrey Eugenides' "Great Experiment", published in the March 31 edition of the New Yorker:

"How had it happened in one generation? His parents' bedroom had never looked like this. Kendall's father had a dresser full of folded laundry, a closet full of tailored suits, and, every night, a neat, clean bed to climb into. Nowadays, if Kendall wanted to live as his own father had lived, he was going to have to hire a cleaning lady and a seamstress and a social secretary. He was going to have to hire a wife. Wouldn't that be great? Stephanie could use one, too. Everybody needed a wife, and no one had one anymore."

I'm going to leave this one without a comment.