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SNA and "Clout Rank Algorithm" #SNA-ONA-VNA

Bruce Karney <bkarney@...>
 

The recent post about SNA at Braintrust spurred this train of though.

Many of us have heard about Google's Page Rank Algorithm. It has grown
in complexity over time, but the basic idea has been explained to me as:

The rank (or importance) of a web page is based on the NUMBER of other
pages that link to it, and the rank of those pages.

So, if I create a new web page and only one other page points to mine,
the rank of my page depends on how many OTHER pages link to the page
that points to mine. That seems reasonable and straightforward.

This simple insight has created several hundred Google millionaires in
Silicon Valley.

My question: does anyone know of a Clout Rank Algorithm that measures a
person's ability to exercise "clout" through their social network?
Wouldn't such a measure work similarly to Page Ranking?

At an extreme, if you were to discover that you were on a subway train
suffering from amnesia, knowing no one, you would have zero clout. But
if you were Jack Welch or Tony Blair, with thousands of friends and
acquaintances, many of them powerful, you would have vast amounts of
clout.

Has anyone ever managed to construct a quantitative model of this?
Would such models provide value to individuals or to businesses?

Could a conscious process of trying to acquire more clout be morally
positive, if one's intention was to use that clout to improve the
world, or are attempts to accumulate clout almost always simply social
climing? (By the way, I get the impression from Bill and Melinda Gates
recent interest in medical philanthropy that he has been deploying his
enormous clout in VERY positive ways.)

I'd love to hear from anyone with thoughts to share on this topic.

Cheers,
Bruce Karney
bkarney@...
650-964-3567 (Pacific Time Zone home #)
Jack Vinson <jackvinson@...>
 

Is there a Clout Rank in SNA?

Yes. Depending on which SNA camp you follow, it's viewed a few
different ways, but you can very quickly spot the highly connected
people (hubs). This level of connectivity can be calculated as
degree centrality, but on first pass it is related to how many
direct connections a person has. It's a number that says, on
average, how close are people in the network. The lower the number,
the more direct connections a node has.

But you can quickly imagine that a highly-connected person isn't
terribly important if all the people in that network are also highly
interconnected amongst themselves. (I believe this is something
that Google checks for as well - self-referential pages aren't as
highly ranked.) So the next thing to look for are nodes that lie
between groups of nodes. They may not have as many connections, but
they may create connections between important subnetworks. There is
also a measure for this, "betweenness." The higher it is, the more
brokering power that node has.

Finally, you could ask how close is a node to the entire network,
which is a similar measure to degree. The results vary, depending
on the topography of the network. Closeness looks at how quickly
one could communicate with the entire network, rather than the
average separation. The result is that less heavily-connected nodes
might actually be closer overall.

Regards,

Jack Vinson, Ph.D.
Knowledge Jolt, Inc.
http://www.jackvinson.com

-----Original Message-----
From: sikmleaders@...
[mailto:sikmleaders@...] On Behalf Of Bruce Karney
Sent: Friday, February 24, 2006 10:39 PM
To: sikmleaders@...
Subject: [sikmleaders] SNA and "Clout Rank Algorithm"

The recent post about SNA at Braintrust spurred this train of
though.

Many of us have heard about Google's Page Rank Algorithm. It has
grown in complexity over time, but the basic idea has been explained
to me as:

The rank (or importance) of a web page is based on the NUMBER of
other pages that link to it, and the rank of those pages.

So, if I create a new web page and only one other page points to
mine, the rank of my page depends on how many OTHER pages link to
the page that points to mine. That seems reasonable and
straightforward.

This simple insight has created several hundred Google millionaires
in Silicon Valley.

My question: does anyone know of a Clout Rank Algorithm that
measures a person's ability to exercise "clout" through their social
network?
Wouldn't such a measure work similarly to Page Ranking?

At an extreme, if you were to discover that you were on a subway
train suffering from amnesia, knowing no one, you would have zero
clout. But if you were Jack Welch or Tony Blair, with thousands of
friends and acquaintances, many of them powerful, you would have
vast amounts of clout.

Has anyone ever managed to construct a quantitative model of this?
Would such models provide value to individuals or to businesses?

Could a conscious process of trying to acquire more clout be morally
positive, if one's intention was to use that clout to improve the
world, or are attempts to accumulate clout almost always simply
social climing? (By the way, I get the impression from Bill and
Melinda Gates recent interest in medical philanthropy that he has
been deploying his enormous clout in VERY positive ways.)

I'd love to hear from anyone with thoughts to share on this topic.

Cheers,
Bruce Karney
bkarney@...
650-964-3567 (Pacific Time Zone home #)







Yahoo! Groups Links
David Snowden <snowded@...>
 

and just to continue my "the emperor has no clothes" role.  The minute you make an SNA result visible, then the criteria are explicit and the system will be gamed.   In my view SNA between individuals (i) breaks all ethical standards and/or (ii) cannot be trusted as anything explicit will be gamed.

Snowden, D (2005)  “From Atomism to Networks in Social Systems” in The Learning Organization Vol. 12, No. 6 (2005)



Dave Snowden
Founder, The Cynefin Centre
www.cynefin.net


On 26 Feb 2006, at 05:04, Jack Vinson wrote:

Is there a Clout Rank in SNA? 

Yes. Depending on which SNA camp you follow, it's viewed a few
different ways, but you can very quickly spot the highly connected
people (hubs).  This level of connectivity can be calculated as
degree centrality, but on first pass it is related to how many
direct connections a person has.  It's a number that says, on
average, how close are people in the network.  The lower the number,
the more direct connections a node has.

But you can quickly imagine that a highly-connected person isn't
terribly important if all the people in that network are also highly
interconnected amongst themselves.  (I believe this is something
that Google checks for as well - self-referential pages aren't as
highly ranked.)  So the next thing to look for are nodes that lie
between groups of nodes.  They may not have as many connections, but
they may create connections between important subnetworks.  There is
also a measure for this, "betweenness."  The higher it is, the more
brokering power that node has.

Finally, you could ask how close is a node to the entire network,
which is a similar measure to degree.  The results vary, depending
on the topography of the network.  Closeness looks at how quickly
one could communicate with the entire network, rather than the
average separation.  The result is that less heavily-connected nodes
might actually be closer overall. 

Regards,

Jack Vinson, Ph.D.
Knowledge Jolt, Inc.
http://www.jackvinson.com 

-----Original Message-----
From: sikmleaders@...
[mailto:sikmleaders@...] On Behalf Of Bruce Karney
Sent: Friday, February 24, 2006 10:39 PM
To: sikmleaders@...
Subject: [sikmleaders] SNA and "Clout Rank Algorithm"

The recent post about SNA at Braintrust spurred this train of
though.

Many of us have heard about Google's Page Rank Algorithm.  It has
grown in complexity over time, but the basic idea has been explained
to me as:

The rank (or importance) of a web page is based on the NUMBER of
other pages that link to it, and the rank of those pages.

So, if I create a new web page and only one other page points to
mine, the rank of my page depends on how many OTHER pages link to
the page that points to mine.  That seems reasonable and
straightforward.

This simple insight has created several hundred Google millionaires
in Silicon Valley.

My question: does anyone know of a Clout Rank Algorithm that
measures a person's ability to exercise "clout" through their social
network? 
Wouldn't such a measure work similarly to Page Ranking?

At an extreme, if you were to discover that you were on a subway
train suffering from amnesia, knowing no one, you would have zero
clout.  But if you were Jack Welch or Tony Blair, with thousands of
friends and acquaintances, many of them powerful, you would have
vast amounts of clout.

Has anyone ever managed to construct a quantitative model of this? 
Would such models provide value to individuals or to businesses?

Could a conscious process of trying to acquire more clout be morally
positive, if one's intention was to use that clout to improve the
world, or are attempts to accumulate clout almost always simply
social climing?  (By the way, I get the impression from Bill and
Melinda Gates recent interest in medical philanthropy that he has
been deploying his enormous clout in VERY positive ways.)

I'd love to hear from anyone with thoughts to share on this topic.

Cheers,
Bruce Karney
bkarney@...
650-964-3567 (Pacific Time Zone home #)







Yahoo! Groups Links

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J Maloney &#92;(jheuristic&#92;) <jtmalone@...>
 

Bruce --

Google is based on a social network archetype called prestige. It is a SNA
concept surfaced in the first-half of 20th Century. It is based on studies
of baboons. Brin/Page built Google on this principle, among others. The rest
is history. There is a lot of info available for both. There are more
billion-dollar companies yet to be released by S/VNA.

'The Bible': http://tinyurl.com/eh3zc
'The Paper': http://tinyurl.com/f2bbp
SNA/VNA: http://kmblogs.com/public/item/115274

VN/VNA is a mainstay of KM excellence. In OSI reference parlance SNA/ONA is
the physical, data link layers (the knowledge pathways) and VNA is the
application layer or business layer (the ecomonic 'whole system'). These
'economic value networks' (EVN) are critical for knowledge-based
organizations. They are a topic of active research in our own backyard, by
board-mates and colleagues, e.g.,

"2. Funded by the Bechtel Initiative at Stanford University, I am conducting
a project entitled "The Networks of Silicon Valley". Though everyone agrees
that the most crucial aspect of Silicon Valley's dramatic success is its
networks, there has been virtually no systematic study of their history,
structure and functioning. In this project, we propose to map these networks
and their evolution over time. Using relational database methods developed
in our study of the electricity industry, we will track the affiliation of
company principals, trace the "genealogies" of new firms, and show how
movements of people among firms continuously shapes and reshapes networks of
both individuals and organizations. We also intend to study the
institutional complex that supports local industrial activity, including
financial, educational, legal, and political sectors. We hope that the end
result will be the first comprehensive sociological account of an
"industrial district." (Mark Graonovetter, Joan Butler Ford Professor,
School of Humanities and Sciences, Chair, Department of Sociology, Stanford
University)

Also see: http://kmblogs.com/public/item/117131

The SF/Silicon Valley EVN conversations commence April 7, 2006 at UCSF.


Cheers,

John
http://kmblogs.com/

-----Original Message-----
From: sikmleaders@... [mailto:sikmleaders@...]
Sent: Saturday, February 25, 2006 3:39 PM
To: sikmleaders@...
Subject: [sikmleaders] Digest Number 31

There are 6 messages in this issue.

Topics in this digest:

1. SNA and "Clout Rank Algorithm"
From: "Bruce Karney" <bkarney@...>
2. Re: Employee-created Company Values
From: David Snowden <snowded@...>
3. RE: Employee-created Company Values
From: "Raj Datta" <rajd@...>
4. RE: Employee-created Company Values
From: "Steve Denning" <steve@...>
5. Re: Employee-created Company Values
From: David Snowden <snowded@...>
6. Re: Employee-created Company Values
From: David Snowden <snowded@...>


________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________

Message: 1
Date: Sat, 25 Feb 2006 04:38:32 -0000
From: "Bruce Karney" <bkarney@...>
Subject: SNA and "Clout Rank Algorithm"

The recent post about SNA at Braintrust spurred this train of though.

Many of us have heard about Google's Page Rank Algorithm. It has grown in
complexity over time, but the basic idea has been explained to me as:
1 - 4 of 4