Giuseppe@Bonaccorso.org Blog

We are assisting to a brand new kind of humanism: in a period characterized by a continuous “wave” of technological improvements, the oldest idea of person is again ready to be considered as a concrete focal point. Even the most orthodox “tech-fun” can easily understand the importance of putting each natural, direct relation inside a world often made up only of silicon and intangible atoms of information; I’m an engineer and certainly won’t try to hide my “love” for any kind of technology, however I’m also looking at the impressive growth of social networks and the only plausible reason which comes to my mind is that of a different approch to technology widespreading. Not a product to study, customize and eventually use, but rather a simple service “forged” on real needs and, above all, completely human-oriented.

Several authors (like J. Rifkin) wrote books and papers about this phenomenum, but I believe that’s quite hard to feel its enormous strength without a stop… Yes, a real life-stream stop: think about your life twenty years ago without any kind of reference to your current way to face each situation, then compare these two realities and the strangest paradox is that a “feared” trend towards a machine-controlled world is instaed getting into a new humane “revolution” driven by the technology itself !

Tags: humanism, social+networking, web, web+2.0, technology

I’ve read several articles about a good way to enlarge one’s own network inside LinkedIn or other social networking tools: it could be a rather “simple” task given the number of involved users, however a bit of strategy may prevent some common mistakes that can penalize this brand new kind of “gold rush“… That’s my recipe:

There are some particular groups made up of open networkers (just like LION or OpenNetworkers.info, for instance) which purpose is to create communities of people who are interested in connecting among themselves. This is obviously a good way to find out new potential contacts, but it can easily turn into a very frustrating stumble if a person has a limited number of invitations (just like inside LinkedIn, where there’s a limitation of 3000 attempts) and “throw away” them all only with other internal members.

The reason is simple: each group established in order to encourage mutual connections is destined to become an isle inside a social network as its clustering coefficient (*) gets higher and higher with an extraordinary density of links and the number of new members remains quite lower than the daily increment of internal connections.

In other words, such a straining, if abused, may bring about an outstanding limitation of any possibility to exploit a “Small World” network and its easy-fillable gap between levels of connection. Thus I believe that a good advice for an open-networking start-up is to try and find new potential contacts looking at the “boudaries” of such groups and giving an higher weight to 3rd (or more) level connections rather than nearer “friends” with thousands of common links.

In order to understand this kind of strategy you can use the network analyzed supplied by LinkedIn: it’s not absolutely difficult to discover that growth-speed of 2nd level connections is lower and lower than 1st level one ! That’s a clear sign that the majority of our new links are bringing only common friends and shortly (with an imposed limitation, above all) our network will saturate in a kind of equilibrium point where our possibility to expand it is now next to zero.

So exploit the potential of open networking, but remember to keep a sufficient number of unused invitations for your “exotic, rare souvenirs” !

Tags: connections, expansion, links, lion, network+theory, open+networkers, small+worlds, social, social+networking, strategy, linkedin

Yesterday I tried to answer a question on LinkedIn about the value we can assign to high level connections (3rd or greater): a quite good question from several point of views.

I think that the main problem of “Small Worlds” theory is brought about the huge amount of information needed in order to get a fast propagation through a certain social network. A world can be really small, but such a property may be easily tested by its members only if there’s a global and widespread knowledge about both the structure and the nature of the majority of nodes which a network is made up of.

Thus the value of a 3rd level connection has to be considered not only from an intrinsic point of view (a person we can contact directly just like other “nearer” friends), but also as an additional set of information that we can exploit in order to speed up our “network-trip”. Of course an utility like an Internet-based social aggregator, extends this possibility by a general strengthening of many cognitive functions (memory, first of all) that allows a person to “remember” thousands of complex profiles and, above all, to find out any kind of information in a very short time.

I believe that such a reality can reconfigure the very “perceived” topology of network, so the only difference between a 1st level connection and a 3rd level one would be caused by an aware will to keep a sham gap in order to separate “real” contacts from virtual (in this case, potential but outside) ones.

Tags: acquaintance, connections, contacts, information, links, networks, small+worlds

Every LinkedIn member soon becomes acquainted with a particular policy ordained in order to prevent (theoretically…) spam messages: “An invitation must always be sent to people you know“.

However I believe that such an instruction is quite ambiguous and maybe too far from the real concept of “social networking“: what kind of knowledge are we talking about ? If a connection should be established only after an external phase of acquaintance, LinkedIn would become a mere contacts collector or an address book.

Of course the possibility to find out connections paths between two different people is rather interesting, but it seems more a pursuit than a real “power-tool” because introductions (the other way to connect with a member) are surely slower and much more boring than a direct invitation.

Personal privacy must always be respected, but as in our “real” life we can decline an invitation without matter of concern, the same behaviour should be adopted in any (e-)social network. It’s pretty worrying a world when spam fighting and preventions is turned into another witch hunt and where a person has to think twice before asking for real or virtual friendship…

I’m completely opened to any contact and will never use the “I don’t know” command ! Feel free to send me invitations: My LinkedIn Profile.

Tags: acquaintance, connection, knowledge, link, policy, spam, linkedin

It is certailny a great book, however, in my opinion, there’s still an important difference between two main kinds of decentralized organizations that should be defined in a more accurate way: structures like Wikipedia have a clear, well defined and global goal (for example, creating a unique and complete world-wide encyclopedia), while almost any P2P network should be considered as a widespread (distributed) structure based on thousands of “local” activities that make a global network emerge as an inner property of the system itself.

Such a reflection could be useful in order to understand the difficulty inherent the attempt to transform a classical, centralized organization into a “starfish” one. Even if the authors mark the enormous difference that exists between a normal CEO and a catalyst, it seems that any kind of decentralized system may represent the target of a network-oriented conversion process, just like the one worked by Peter Drucker inside General Motors.

I think, together with Brafman and Beckstrom, that a centralized organization which aim is to reach a precise goal imposed directly or indirectly by its stakeholders, can be transformed only into a particular kind of starfish that must keep at least the globality of every management purpose. In other words, a starfish without a unique brain, but which cells are sufficiently “skilled” to achieve a common goal rather than a locally self-centred activity target.

This concept can be easily accepted by a centralized company, but it’s still too hard whenever each peer of a network (like eMule or Kazaa) is free to search and offer (often illegally) materials only according to a limited set of personal “whims”. Another subtle difference can be found between organizations like eBay and other decentralized or hybrid structures: in the former, almost any user activity is treated as a part of a complex system that is always defined through an abstract concept.

Even if there’s a high-level central control, its management board can work only with generic “transactions”, or, to be more precise, with with a large and heterogeneous group of them. A great or poor result is thus an emergent property which “components” are almost completely hidden and this condition brings about a general global behaviour much more similar to Wikipedia than GM (post-Drucker) even if eBay has a CEO and a board of directors whose decisions must be respected by every employee.

A starfish is surely a good solution, but when there’s a central brain, maybe it’s quite better to share a common point of view !

Tags: p2p, beckstrom, books, brafman, company, ebay, gm, management, networks, social+networking, spider, starfish, wikipedia, organizations

A Web 2.0 “Sociological” point of view is probably the most interesting analysis, mainly because it can be really considered as the very network revolution. Web 1.0 could rely only on a kind of link: the one obtained from <a …> tags; its purpose was (and still it is) to allow the connection between two different documents according to their content or other criteria (they’re often marketing-oriented). Thus the resultant network was made up of several (pseudo-)static or slowly changing nodes which connectivity was always bound by lots of limitations (first of all a spare knowledge about similar resources). Pure hypertextual technology was certainly great, but its weaker point was that of hiding the human beings, with their mutable nature, who were always behind the origin and development of each document (or web page).

Web 1.0 was just like a geographical network (like a city map, for example) where human action is seldom considered as a predominant factor and often not regarded at all. The main difference between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 is therefore a radical change of view: every sub-network is now constituted by entities which can behave in a way that is isomorphic to their generators, and so, even if we cannot think of a global techno-human network yet, nowadays we may be present to the very genesis of many “social-made” networks.

Actually this transition began in a period when the word “Web 2.0″ was completely unknown and a lot of new peculiar technologies didn’t yet exist: several communities introduced a kind of “built-in” network which participants should model according to their needs. Each member shared a common space where any node was created, modified or deleted without a strong central control; of course all the connections were established in a dynamic way, just like the very attitude of people in a small town, and their “meaning” could change reflecting the type of relation existing between two or more members.

It was probably thanks to those communities that the web “version-transition” could start, each small innovative idea was a percentage point towards a new “realease”, until the attainment of a breaking point, a moment when it’s unavoidable to notice a clear difference. We are living in such a moment and can expect a new extraordinary revolution in the next years.

Tags: complexity, emergence, internet, links, networks, scale+free, social+networking, sociology, web2.0, www

When Sir Tim Berners-Lee had his stroke of genius and invented the World Wide Web, he didn’t surely think about its extraordinaty present developments, just like a father normally hopes his children’s wellbeing, but he can’t seldom figure out every particular detail of their future. Such a behaviour strikes everybody as a strange kind of myopia, like a bewitched gold-digger who stops in front of a slight glow and forgets its source. Even if there could be a strong temptation to believe it, severeal studies showed that its deep nature is quite different and probably no suitable attitude may avoid it.

The first time I studied the concept of Emergence, I was attending a Complex Systems course at university, and my very first thought was that of a pure “scientific skepticism”: a sparkling description for an idea that had soon gone up in smoke… When I realized its immense strenght, by then lots of its new and pervasive implications had already flourished and widespread. There is a moment during the life of concept when a crossroads appears above the horizon: on one hand a radical change to keep living with a renewed fashion, on the other its stagnation anf then, inexorable, a decay towards its death. That’s the right time for emergence: as the whole is greater than its parts, a brand new system state assumes the role of “point of equilibrium far from the only real stable equilibrium”.

According to I. Prigogine’s theory this kind of reality takes and dissipates external energy in order to maintain a vital, productive condition. The World Wide Web was born as an information sharing tool, nowadays we all are experimenting its natural evolution that was called Web 2.0 and which main difference from its “ancestor” is the meaning of each link; what represented only the possibility to associate several hypertextual documents, it’s now a road between two microcosmos made up of people with their knowledge and experiences, services, utilities and much more. Such a phenomenum is hard to be imagined during a design phase because we’re used to get effects by summing up each single contribution as inverse logical operation of the same reductionism adopted for the analysis.

It’s not astonishing at all if a similar “technique”, often chosen in Neurosciences, has been ousted after many scientists have accepted emergence as the most plausible explanation of consciousness; in fact, even a brain is a very big network with an enormous connection density and its nodes don’t seem to be able to bring about anything which can be compared to what we call “consciousness”. Only some sort of non-linear interaction may be concerned in the matter as its creative possibilities are (now) theorically unlimited and the only thing we can do (at the largest scale) is waiting for new, impressive evolutions.

A good introductory book about Emergence is: Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software by Steven Johnson.

Tags: complexity, emergence, prigogine, tim+berners+lee, web2.0, www, networks

Many years ago Arnold Zuboff wrote a novel (republished into The Mind’s I) which “main character” was a biological brain; but not a normal, compact one:
it had been split more and more times, from two big parts since billions of smaller cells. Of course every single neuron was connected to other ones just like in a whole brain, so its complete functionality was preserved and the result of all interactions could be still considered as a real personality.

In a period of monolithic applications the concept of global distribution was surely treated as a possible but irrational reality, however, even if with
a bit of humour, such a novel does explains something that is currently happening with different characters but the same identical roles and functions. Network society is now so rooted in our life that almost nobody is able to “feel” its daily action; maybe the majority of us are careless, or most likely, according to Gregory Bateson’s words, we’ve begun forgetting the fleeting Cartesian difference between any living mind and the rest of lifeless objects and we’re now considering it all as the result of a “process“.

However, in despite of every philosophical theory, concepts like distribution, emergence and interaction are not simply widespread as appropriate market brands: they are allowing us to live in the way we’d like to live. This is true for almost any natural person whose “connection skill” represents now the result of en extended mind which boundaries have been shifted in a far, unknown territory (always controlled by the science-fiction). And that’s true for companies too,
where the standard, classical organization is making way for a new kind of structure based on lots of network links with hubs and small nodes.

An interesting novelty is also that of Business Operanting System (BOS) as clearly described by E. Van Heck and P. Varvest in “Smart Business Networks: How the Network Wins” (Communication of the ACM, 50/6):
the interconnection of companies can thus be compared to computers’ ones as they all may be free to implement their operating strategies according to a common standard behaviour that lets a company keep a personal autonomy and identity nevertheless being able to exploit all the benefits that spring from remaining a part of network.

I don’t think we are reaching a “global human distribution” as in Zuboff’s novel, however I’m always glad to discover that a new kind of collaboration is being rising: not a useful way to solve problems too hard for a single person, but a concrete, brand new attitude of mind fit to face any possible human activity.

Tags: books, business, companies, complexity, economy, emergence, interaction, social+networking, society, technology, networks

It has been proved that social networks are based on a scale-free model: there are few hubs with lots of connections and several small nodes with few links. However I wonder what is the level of global connectivity inside a well-known network like LinkedIn.

In other words I’d like to know if there are small or large isles made up of a group of isolated nodes; it’s not so easy to answer this question and maybe the only valid result may come from a direct analysis of network data, however it’s possible to assume some hypothesis in order to simplify our problem:

• The distribution of hubs in a scale-free network is homogeneous in a context defined by geography, jobs, common interests, etc.
• We exclude every smaller isle (they can be considered as isolated nodes). The critical dimension can be estimated according to total number of nodes. A lower value always assures a better precision, but it can be more difficult to accomplish the analysis.
• There is at least one hub per isle. This hypothesis is not easy to accept at all, however it’s not unduly simplicistic to presuppose that all sufficiently larger isles are scale-free networks themselves; thus, according to out first hypothesis, the probability to find a hub in each isle is rather high.

If the previous pre-conditions are accepted, we can check if all main hubs are connected: in the positive case, the probability of presence of large isles is next to zero. Of course, I’m going to check it out…

Any comment or criticism is well-accepted !

Tags: connectivity, hubs, linkedin, nodes, scale+free, social+networks

Reference Post: Connection Categories

I think that a clarification could be useful… I believe that in particular networks (just like the Internet), the requirements of usability and accessibility oblige every big node (hub) to assume an adaptive behavior which main feature is to hide the majority of possible links in order to show only a limited subset of them according to a particular request. In this way, their functional architecture becomes “fluid”, and so much more able to meet different users’ needs; however the reverse side of this strategy (that is often the only plausible one…) is a complete loss of their hub-bity property.

Tags: hubs, internet, links, networks, connections