Social networking as a business tool
The blog update for today from Many-to-Many caught my eye as it posts the strategy description from the front page of Socialtext, which describes the way a business should convince employees to use the wiki setup that Socialtext sells.
Basically what it boils down to is: you won't convince everyone to use it, but if you can convince just a small core of users to do nearly all of the work on it, then you'll be successful in implementing such a business wiki (and it will boost productivity a billion percent etc etc buy our product etc etc).
This supernode idea is exactly why nearly all the social networking programs work, and it's perhaps not surprising given that it's how most social organisation works outside of the online environment as well. I offer no specific evidence of this, but I'm sure someone must have done studies on this. Is the key to success not to encourage everyone to cooperate but to encourage a specific few to cooperate far more than their fair share?
In a loosely cooperative agent community where a (decentralised?) reputation system is in place (but where a tragedy of the commons is possible because the things that need doing require a small cost to cooperate with but are a public good) maybe being a supernode can be encouraged by the fact that as a supernode in a given task the agent becomes a supernode in the network with associated benefits from a good reputation. In which problem domain is this the case?
The other suggestion from Phil Kilby just earlier based on this kind of concept was that a way to encourage supernodes might be for the supernode agents to convince the agents in the second-tier of cooperation to cooperate further and so on instead of pushing the least cooperative agents to become slightly cooperative.
Basically what it boils down to is: you won't convince everyone to use it, but if you can convince just a small core of users to do nearly all of the work on it, then you'll be successful in implementing such a business wiki (and it will boost productivity a billion percent etc etc buy our product etc etc).
This supernode idea is exactly why nearly all the social networking programs work, and it's perhaps not surprising given that it's how most social organisation works outside of the online environment as well. I offer no specific evidence of this, but I'm sure someone must have done studies on this. Is the key to success not to encourage everyone to cooperate but to encourage a specific few to cooperate far more than their fair share?
In a loosely cooperative agent community where a (decentralised?) reputation system is in place (but where a tragedy of the commons is possible because the things that need doing require a small cost to cooperate with but are a public good) maybe being a supernode can be encouraged by the fact that as a supernode in a given task the agent becomes a supernode in the network with associated benefits from a good reputation. In which problem domain is this the case?
The other suggestion from Phil Kilby just earlier based on this kind of concept was that a way to encourage supernodes might be for the supernode agents to convince the agents in the second-tier of cooperation to cooperate further and so on instead of pushing the least cooperative agents to become slightly cooperative.
posted by Rowan at
2:49 PM
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