Why am I doing this? Not because we have no budget or anything like that it's simply because I think we can and I don't think it takes that much (in terms of tools) to really build up a social network, it's something we do daily in the contact that we have with those around us.
So what is a social network?
"A social network is a social structure made of nodes (which are generally individuals or organizations) that are tied by one or more specific types of interdependency, such as values, visions, ideas, financial exchange, friendship, kinship, dislike, conflict or trade. The resulting structures are often very complex.
Social network analysis views social relationships in terms of nodes and ties. Nodes are the individual actors within the networks, and ties are the relationships between the actors. There can be many kinds of ties between the nodes. Research in a number of academic fields has shown that social networks operate on many levels, from families up to the level of nations, and play a critical role in determining the way problems are solved, organizations are run, and the degree to which individuals succeed in achieving their goals.
In its simplest form, a social network is a map of all of the relevant ties between the nodes being studied. The network can also be used to determine the social capital of individual actors. These concepts are often displayed in a social network diagram, where nodes are the points and ties are the lines."
(Via Social network - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.)
Or a more "social" approach to the definition,
On the web in the days before all these fancy tools we used things like Webring to tie all our sites together. Webring is still strong today and I still see lots of use of it and that made me wonder.
For me a social network is at the raw form a collection of "Who am I"'s tied together in some form or manner.
Over on SCN we have a wiki space dedicated to this purpose, we call it the Community Profiles or perhaps "Community Pages" - now since it's a wiki and easy to edit we decided to add a clause, very un-wiki like but still it's to protect the legitimate users from those who might want to "spam". Our community has a reputation system based on point values and so in order to be allowed into this particular space to basically market yourself you need to devote some time and energy to the community and earn up to 100 of these "points". This shows you've been in the community long enough to have a decent understanding of what it is all about, it prevents instead overload of everyone just putting junk in there and it helps to really highlight those who are putting an effort forth. Un-social network like? Perhaps but with over a million users quality needs to be ensured in some way.
Now as it's a wiki we encourage the use of the labels or tags on each page - my page for example I use multiple tags to indicate the languages I speak, the locations I am active, the technologies I know and the events I am attending.
The page itself is free form (we provide some templates to get you started) so I am able to put my entire resume or a simple bio in if I like and I can do so in my native language, in my native language and English (language of choice on the site), so on and so forth.
Do I need more? What more do any of these fancy tools and site offer me? To be honest not much more and as I am in the wiki environment anyway it's quite easy to just jump over and link to things I am doing already. The environment is specific to SAP technology, strategy and business which would be what I might be trying to market from my skill set anyway. All very targeted and still very free form for me to write what I feel important and not be trapped into some form where specific fields are required - this is my chance to be me, about me and what I do and "Who I am".
Now using the wiki search it's quite easy to find myself and others who share certain tags, or simply click a tag like "flex" and I find those who have added that tag as well - I can then expand that to the entire wiki covering every area and instantly see who of those people has been active in the topic across the board.
Why would I do that? Well for starters if I am having trouble and need help I have a couple of choices, first I can email, IM and Twitter everyone I know to ask - a bit intrusive; I can post a message to the forum - what happens though if it's not 100% specific to SAP technology? Finally I can go this route via the "Community Pages" and then look to see what contact info the person has made available and perhaps narrow my search to a very targeted few people and build a new connection and solve a problem all at the same time.
In essence we are putting the raw nuts and bolts behind the concept of a social network in place to let the community find each other - it's been an exciting project and I have been learning a lot in how people deal with each other and the self promotion/self marketing concept. Ego surfing it's not, at least not if you are careful about it. Are we taking a step back from the advancements in social networks like Ning, Facebook, MySpace? I don't think so because we are not replacing them or competing for their users we are simply giving our existing users the ability to tell us "Who am I" and build connections to their peers within the environment they are comfortable with.
Our next stage which has already begun is the building of an interface client with added features on top that are perhaps not necessary in the system but useful to the users, for example the ability to easily add notes for a specific member you have come across.
From the screenshot you can see (or perhaps not) that it's based on Adobe Air and is a alpha test version of the client. Here's a small screen cam of how it all works so far.
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community, development, experience, experiment, sap, wiki, social networks
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