Living in the wealth of networks and technologies of co-operation

In our book, one of our major insights way back in the distant days of 2005 was the notion that we must move from interruptive communications to engagement.

And that takes many courses, but social networking plays a key and central role to engagement so welcome to the network of scientists.

Shall we have a meet-up in Halifax? Discuss blogging, science etc? types Jason.
“I’d like to find an easy method to study the interaction of a known peptide with other unknown peptides, taps Carol.

Is the opening lines of an article by Jessica Shepherd

And she is referring to Nature Network

So what’s it all about?

The site, which started only in late February, in Boston, already has more than 10,000 users in the UK and hundreds of thousands across the world.

Here scientists discuss how best to conduct experiments and whether to post their research findings online. Debates that might have had to wait until the annual microscopy conference in Auckland rage online from university laboratories in the UK.

It is all for strictly professional use, of course. Except that, like Facebook, the scientists who use it are mainly in their late 20s and early 30s and may be hoping to discover a life-, as well as a research-, partner online.

Then we have Talent in in a virtual world (subsciption required)

Faced with a would-be employee who had visited its offices under an assumed identity, loaded company information on to their personal computer and picked the brains of staff, many recruiters would be tempted to call in security. Fortunately for Alexis Kingsbury, PA Consulting?s response was to offer him a job.

The reaction of the UK-based management consultancy is explained by the fact that the covert encounters took place at its virtual offices in Second Life, the computer-generated world in which people interact through alter egos known as avatars. Mr Kingsbury, who graduated from Loughborough University this summer, says that his virtual visits made him more eager to become a consultant, and helped him come across as know ledgeable and confident in his real-life interview.

The FT article, highlights how large professional companies are using social networking technologies to find, attract and assess their candidates from a global vs. a local pool of talent.

Say goodbye to the recruitment industry as we knew it.

The summary is that

In the days before online communities, talent hungry companies devoted themselves to a few well-chosen campuses. In the future, the prizes will go to employers who marry a deft persoanl touch with the reach of personal networks.

And why is that so? Because

Social networks are now seen as central to the way in which young adults toggle between business and leisure. “Many people run their life through online communities,” says Alison Heron, recruitment marketing manager at KPMG. “If we want to talk to them about opportunities in professional services, we have to be in there too.” So if recruiters need a presence, what form should it take?

One option is to approach social networks commercially. In the US, Ernst & Young has created a sponsored membership group on Facebook for anyone interested in an E&Y career. Although identified as a corporate promotion, E&Y?s pages retain something of the spirit of social networking, leavening careers materials with photos posted by group members and opportunities to pose questions to E&Y employees.

More than 8,000 people have signed up to E&Y?s group, showing that businesses will not automatically be shunned as gate-crashers. Nonetheless, the medium merits close evaluation.

And back to Network Nature

Paul Wicks, a 25-year-old postdoctoral student at the Institute of Psychiatry, King’s College London, who has registered on the site, says: “It’s getting people at the same level from different institutions and different research fields to talk to one another about the thing they have in common: a love of science.

“A high hope would be that it will forge collaborations and interdisciplinary projects. A more realistic expectation is that it will form some of the glue between researchers, in terms of networking, career prospects and personal relationships.”

He adds that he has already found a “geek-loving woman who can at least pretend to listen to me when I talk about 11C Flumazenil PET scanning in rare phenotypes of inherited diseases”.

Scary stuff unless you just happen to be those two people. But its not just for the young. Because its about a state of mind

Nature Network is not just for early career scientists, or even just scientists. Jenny Rohn, a 39-year-old senior research fellow in molecular cell biology at University College London, blogs on the site. Frank Norman, a 50-year-old librarian at the National Institute for Medical Research, regularly logs on.

The advancement of science.

Once upon a time you worked alone, ignorent of who else was doing what. But today, perhaps there is a more collaborative model. As Howard Reheingold says, these are technologies of co-operation, which could allow

scientists who post comments, blogs and data from experiments on sites like Nature Network to eventually be allowed to count these as part of their research output. “We are increasingly seeing the online world with its informal rapid communications complement the slower, more formal communications of academic journals. There should be a way of measuring the impact of a scientist who posts comments on a site like Nature Network. These could be added to their publishing record for the research assessment exercise [in which every active researcher in every university in the UK is assessed by panels of other academics]. I think the funding bodies will see that these contributions add to the scientific knowledge base.

And for our own research we found SIPHS: a life science network that shares and aggregates information on a peer to peer basis This is what it does

SIPHS, a tool that leverages an online community in a different fashion: rather than searching for online documents, users search for community members with a particular knowledge set. We established SIPHS in response to a shared frustration. The Internet was designed to put people in touch, but it is quite difficult to identify individuals that possess very specific, often highly technical knowledge.

Members of SIPHS can search for peer-generated information, ask questions of other members, and provide peer support

So welcome to living within the wealth of networks

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Posted in: Distribution, Engagement Marketing, Generation C, Health, Media, Networks, Participation, Social Networks, Trends, Web/Tech

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