ETech 2006: ...Better Collaborative Filtering

The talk by Charles Armstrong (an ethnographer) and CEO of Trampoline Systems was quite interesting. He studied under sociologist Lord Young of Dartington and at the School for Social Entrepreneurs (SSE). While studying at SSE he spent a year on the Isles of Scilly (photos), where he helped people learn computer skills. It was here that he studied the flow of information (or news) within the community.

What was intriguing was how efficiently information valuable to a specific person or group was passed on to them as it came to the island (can't remember which island he was on, I think the population was about 100). Usually a boat would come to the island daily delivering supplies and information or news would be passed to the people helping unload it. For example, maybe the boat would not be coming tomorrow so the news would pass to everyone who planned to take the boat to the mainland the next day - well before the end of the day.

His talked really had me thinking about Watts and Newmans paper Identity and Search in Social Networks. I think Watts's description in his book Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age somewhat models what Armstrong observed.

His company, Trampoline Systems, provides "a technology that helps groups of people connect, collaborate and manage large quantities of information." From the presentation I concluded that the system would certainly provide an excellent means to do social network analysis of a company via its emails. I believe the system involves configuring your current servers to send copies of emails to a "database". From the Tos and Froms a network can be built, as in the photo on the left. (I'm not positive about the last three sentences.) Some type of content analysis of the emails is under development (maybe some type of automatic categorization) to facilitate the sharing of information. I didn't get how the this part of the system will work. I talked to him later in the day about the system but unfortunately we did not have time to go into any details.

To get a non-technical understanding of good verses bad social or project networks within a company I would recommend The Hidden Power of Social Networks: Understanding How Work Really Gets Done in Organizations by Robert L. Cross, et al...