Wednesday, June 18, 2008

Day 1 @ KM4Dev.. Experimenting with SNA!

We started the afternoon by splitting into 10 groups to do Social Network Analysis. This KS method is used to identify and analyse relationships between people. We started off with identifying who were our partners in sharing KM information. So, for example if we found something on the KM4Dev list, who else would we share it with? The result was a long list of over 60+ networks!

This was followed by first identifying the 5 people in the KM4Dev community that we work closely with, that we regularly follow (or stalk! ;-)) and those that we would like to build closer relationships with. At the end, we had to rate the players in the community from 1 to 5 for being drivers either in content or getting the community active.

At the end, Eva, who had facilitated this process, asked for the feedback from the all of us on this methodology which was visually captured by Nancy:

CIMG4990


CIMG4990

I think this method is great for analysis of how the major players in projects interact with each other, both as individual level and at organizational level. In case of this specific exercise, it would have been better to concentrate on the top few networks/communities (identified in step 1) that we are all working with and explore the hidden linkages and potential overlaps. These could then help us to further explore possible channels for closer collaboration.

More on Social Network Analysis is available from the KS Toolkit.

No comments: