Swarming

Marketstudies of mobile workers tends to overestimate employees needs for advanced communication services. Employees that are active users of mobile ICT are often manual workers or salesmen interested in doing other things than experimenting with advanced collaboration solutions on small screens. In developing markets voice and SMS will probably be dominating for several years ahead. A promising application for mobile work groups , however, are messaging systems that interconnect small groups through multiple channels. "Swarm teams" is a many-to-many interactive system compared to traditional social software (MySpace/Facebook/Twitter) which are one-to-many broadcast systems. Swarmteams is a multichannel, Smart Messaging system for use on mobiles as well as PCs. It may help organisations turn audiences into communities, but also to interconnect loosely connected collaborators. For music lovers, SwarmTribes has been developed to helps bands and labels keep in direct touch with their biggest fans, and encourages them to recruit and communicate to their own 'swarms' of other fans.

Catnets

Some groups may never interact face to face, but still have a strong identity, and operate as a category. Other may interact regulaily, but still lack any common identity or "sense of belonging". Approaching groups as networks or categories often appear as a duality. However, sometimes they may overlap in particular strong units, coined by the term Catnets. The idea and the term can be traced back to Harrison Whites paper,"Notes on the Constituents of Social Structure", and later in his book Identity and control. The last number of Sociologica discusses the ¨concept of catnets in detail and also includes an article by White himself on "Catnets forty years later". http://www.sociologica.mulino.it/journal/issue/index/Issue/Journal:ISSUE:4

Applications of Social Network Analysis – ASNA2008

The 5th conference on Applications of Social Network Analysis (ASNA
2008) will again take place at the University of Zurich. ASNA 2008 will primarily provide an interdisciplinary venue with focus on applications of social network analysis. This year's keynote will be simulcasted via the internet to a parallel event at Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto, Japan. The Japaneese session of ASNA2008 (codenamed "ASNA2008-Asia"), will mainly focus on (the existing, emerging, or just possible) technological aspects of applications of social network analysis.

Mobilizing Social Capital with ICT

From a theoretical point of view there is no lack on contribution as to how ICT might affect the social capital of individuals, groups and societies. The number of thorough empirical studies has however been scarce. On recent European research initiative is MOSCITO (Mobilizing Social Capital in ICT based Organizations), involving researchers from University of Trondheim, University of Michigan, University of Nijmegen, University of Oslo, as well as Chimera and Telenor R&I. The goal of the project is to "generate new empirical insights and accumulate evidence in the form of practical organizational knowledge as to how organizations operating on an international scene can use specific communication technologies to develop, maintain, combine and exploit social capital". The project will focus on three central types of technological clusters: mobile applications, web-based applications and e-mails & messaging, and investigate how each of these clusters affects the deployment of social capital in work settings. The project is funded by the Norwegian Research Council and managed by Studio Apertura at NTNU, Trondheim.