Stephen Asunka

Harnessing the Power of Social Networks

Having read Barabasi's Linked, I now have a clear understanding of why some social networks continue to flourish whilst others flounder along or grow steadily only to collapse dramatically. Though I was aware of the presence of some influential persons or groups (hubs) in social networks, I was generally of the opinion that networks are made of nodes and random links between them (with six degrees of separation). As I understand networks now, most are basically scale-free and self-organizing, and are governed by power laws, and so are flexible and very tolerant to internal failures and external interventions.

Thus whereas communist networks have all but collapsed, other networks such as the illicit drug cartels, the mafias and terrorist networks have stood the test of time despite all the interventions so far put in place to uproot them. Communism was being held by a major hub - the Soviet Union - a phenomenon which Barabasi describes as the Achilles' heel of networks. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 (akin to removal of a major hub in a network), triggered a "cascading failure" which virtually engulfed the whole of Eastern Europe. On the other hand Al-Qaeda is a typical self-organizing scale-free network, and so even in the absence or otherwise of their leaders, the network still operates.

The lesson one can lesson from this book is that, in an attempt to create or foster a social network of any kind, one should not create a situation where the entire network overly depends one person or resource. Also to get the network growing and self-sustaining, then the network should be increasing the desire for people to be part of it by focusing on issues that people are very passionate about, either by virtue of their beliefs, perspectives or aspirations. Offering freebies (as in the case of hotmail at its inception) is another option, but in the educational sector, this will be hardly feasible.

At the time I came up with my Issue Entrepreneurship proposal, I had not yet read Linked. So my proposal was about creating a blog or wiki that will serve as a knowledge forum for high school and college science teachers, especially those in the developing countries. I thought that by putting a blog or wiki out there and announcing it to people I felt were interested in the issue, I will get some responses and hopefully, create a network of learners and resource persons. Now I am very much aware that such line of action is not the best. Even in the unlikely event that a sizeable number of individuals agree to join in the project, we will not create a robust and scale-free network, since removal of the wiki (hub) will most probably collapse such a network.

So what is the way forward?

Instead of trying to "start" a network, I should rather join some existing networks (as Ulises proposed), and then work towards becoming one of the hubs within the bigger network. Also instead of targeting and addressing only hard core science issues, my blog/wiki will occasionally venture into other science related social issues just to get people interested and willing to participate. Hopefully, as this community grows, it will eventually get to the point that I envisaged at the beginning.

posted by Steve @ 7:30 PM