I started poking around in omidyar.net a few days ago, curious if it can be a resource for locating activist techs and funding. As I’m not really a member of any of the “social networking” sites, I don’t really have a sense of the social protocol. It is kind of like stepping blind into a cocktail party. A few people immediatly contacted me, but I didn’t know who they were other than by reading their profiles. So I got curious about the structure of communication of the site. After a day or so of coding with a little help from carnivore, htmlparser and sonia, I’ve got a few pictures of the network of positive feedback on comments. (people have the ability to give points to eachother’s posts in the fourms, kinda like slashdot)
yup, its one of those “peacock on the windshield” inkblots. I labled myself, all the way out in the astroid belt. Here is a closer look at the core:
Here I labeled a few of the people with the most feedback (sorry for the name truncation). Both of these were done by doing a snowball sample from the list of newbies. The graph is large enough I had to do this with FR algorithm, so I don’t trust the positions that much. I don’t think I’ve got the link tracing code quite right yet, but I think there is some potential. Part of the problem is designing a good weighted snowball procedure that won’t oversample the core. If we had the time data, I could probably do movies… and there is lots of data about communication between groups, but I guess for that we can wait until they complete an API.
Great job! I’ve been looking for a volunteer who can map the network of the Tutor/Mentor Connection to see the connections that we’re forming between people, organizations and information. My goal is to help people better understand who I’ve been contacting over the past 30 years, and how some of these have responded to me, or have become connectors, linking my network to their network.
The goal is to help people better understand and learn from what I’m doing, but to also be more successful at locating the people who act as connectors of one group to another.
If you visit http://www.tutormentorconnection.org you’ll see a wealth of knowledge that anyone can draw from to build more and better volunteer-based tutor/mentor programs in high poverty neighborhoods. In the LINKS area is a sub section with links to innovation, creativity, knowledge management, visual databases, etc. I put these there to illustrate the type of ideas I’m trying to incorporate in the T/MC, and the type of volunteers/partners or donors who are needed for that to happen.
Do you know of a college or other organization that might volunteer to do this as a learning experience, or a donor who might fund someone like you to this for someone like me?
Dan Bassill, tutormentor2@earthlink.net
Chicago