visualizations data sets people comments

Theory and Facilitation 1
The Networked Household
Tracy Kennedy and Barry Wellman, University of Toronto
We argue that many households do not operate as traditional densely-knit groups but as more sparsely-knit social networks where individuals each juggle their own agendas and schedules. Individuals, rather than family solidarities, have become the primary unit of household connectivity. At a time when many people enact multiple, individual roles at home, in the community and at work, we ask: How do adult household members communicate with each other? How do adult household members use ICTs to organize and coordinate their leisure and social behavior both inside and outside the home? How do adult household members use ICTs to share things with each other? Interviews and surveys conducted in 2004-2005 in the Toronto, Canada area of East York examine how household members network with each other and how individuals have supplanted households to become portals of communication and information. Our analyses show that households remain connected - but as networks rather than solidary groups. We show how networked individuals bridge their relationships and connect with each other inside and outside the home. ICTs have afforded household members the ability to go about on their separate ways while staying more connected - by mobile phone, email and IM - as well as by traditional landlines. In such ways, rather than pulling families apart, ICTs often facilitate domestic cohesion.
MTML meets Web 2.0: Theorizing social processes in multidimensional networks Nosh Contractor, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Advances in digital technologies (e.g, Web 2.0) invite consideration of organizing within communities as a process that is accomplished by global, flexible, adaptive, and ad hoc networks that can be created, maintained, dissolved, and reconstituted with remarkable alacrity. Increasingly these networks are multidimensional including individuals as well as digital artifacts and concepts.
This presentation makes the case for a new generation of theorizing about social processes in these multidimensional networks. It proposes a contextually based multi-theoretical multilevel (MTML) model to investigate the dynamics for creating, maintaining, dissolving, and reconstituting these social and knowledge networks in diverse communities. Using examples from his research on communities involved in disaster response, environmental engineering, public health, economic resilience, and MMOs (massively multiplayer online games), Contractor illustrates the potential of the
MTML framework to model how the self-organization of social and knowledge networks are enabled by Web 2.0 technologies. The Evolution of On-Line Community Networks Peter Monge, University of Southern California
Organizational communities are typically defined as populations of organizations that are tied together by networks of relations in overlapping resource niches. Traditionally, evolutionary theorists and researchers have examined organizational populations that comprise organizational communities focusing on their properties rather than the networks that link them. However, a full understanding of the evolution of organizational communities requires insight into both organizations and their networks. Consequently, this article presents initial efforts to apply evolutionary theory to organizational and community networks. It focuses on evolutionary principles, including variation, selection, and retention, that lead to the formation, growth, maintenance, and eventual demise of network linkages. This perspective allows us to understand the ways in which community survival and success are as dependent on their organizational linkages as they are on the organizations they connect.
Theory and Facilitation II
Conversation & Commitment in Online Communities
Robert Kraut, Carnegie Mellon University
Brian Butler, University of Pittsburgh
Moira Burke, Carnegie Mellon University
Lisa Joyce, University of Pittsburgh
...