Too much networking?:
[Via Cosmic Log]
Open-source communities may suffer from “an overabundance of connections,”
an information policy researcher suggests in the journal Science.Are geeks guilty of groupthink? A network expert argues that less social networking would produce more radical innovation on the Internet.
[More]
I have a long post about this at my SpreadingScience blog. I also left a comment at Cosmic Log but I wanted to repeat it here so I can find it again. I think the original paper has identified something important – that some online communities are not very innovative. Rather than it being a fault of the online network, I think it is more a problem of the types of people that make up the online networks.
Everyone goes through at least 5 steps as the adopt new innovations. Innovators and early adopters go through these steps much more rapidly than the early and late majority. If a community does not have enough innovators, as well as enough the critical early adopters to filter useful innovations for the community, then the ability of the community to adopt innovations will be greatly hampered.
Here is my comment on this:
I’m not so sure the problem is the network. The original paper seems to describe the nodes in an impersonal fashion, rather than recognizing that humans are involved, each with their own views.
Networks do not make communities innovative. People make communities innovative. The problem identified may be a result of an ineffective mix of people that make up the network, not the network itself.
Rogers’ work on the technology adoption lifecycle http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_adoption_lifecycle and the diffusion of innovations in a community http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion_of_Innovations would indicate that the makeup of the Open Source community might not be optimal for rapid dispersal of innovative ideas.
In particular, there may not be a sufficient number of early adopters/innovators engaged in these online networks to permit innovations to efficiently diffuse throughout the community. Too few of these types of people make it very likely that the natural tendency of the majority to be evolutionary, not revolutionary, will dominate.
For innovation to traverse a community there needs to be sufficient numbers of early adopters (who filter out good and bad ideas) and innovators (who create the good and bad ideas) to combat the status quo of the majority (who hate to have their workflow disrupted). Without the right mix, ideas that are useful to the community do not get effectively filtered and presented. The conservatism of the majority overwhelms the efforts of early adopters/innovators.
The majority, whether in real life or online, usually only communicates with others in the community, is skeptical of change and often only adopts a new innovation when told to by a respected member of the community, often someone who can be labeled an early adopter.
Early adopters and innovators as a group have the largest number of connections outside the community. They know a lot of people and access a lot of external information. The fact that some of the described networks only connect to themselves indicates to me that they do not have enough early adopters and innovators in the community.
Without an effective core of early adopters whose opinions are respected by the majority, there will be a noticeable slowdown in the rate of diffusion of innovation in a community. Without the right amount of early adopters/innovators to push ideas through to the majority, innovation can falter.
The solution may not be to change the networks as much as to identify and empower early adopters/innovators.
The way to do this in the real world is to put them all in a group called Research where their relative numbers are greatly increased and the conservatism of the majority is not as readily seen.
Skunk works are effective in the real world for similar reasons – they artificially increase the percentage of early adopters/innovators, permitting the filtering activity to be enhanced. They work, not because they change the network but because they alter the relative numbers of key people, such as early adopters/innovators, in a group.
Purposefully creating something like this, and making sure it is well populated with the proper sort of people, could be a big factor in increasing innovation in online networks.
Not because the network itself is necessarily altered but because enough of the ‘right’ people are included.
Technorati Tags: Social media, Web 2.0
