Schedule

Session 1 – Course Organization and Introduction, Feb 3
Basic principles and foundations of Collaborative Knowledge Networks. download Overview Presentation

Chapters 1-7 of Gloor.
Ancona, D. Bresman, H, Kaeufer, K. 2002. The Comparative Advantage of X-Teams. MIT Sloan Management Review, Spring, Vol. 43, No. 3, pp. 33-39
Hamel, Gary, 2001.Waking Up IBM: How a Gang of Unlikely Rebels Transformed Big Blue, Harvard Business Review, April.

Session 2 – The Future of Work, Feb 8, 4:00-5.30 pm, large conference room, NE20-336, Center for Coordination Science
In his groundbreaking book “The Future of Work” Thomas W. Malone describes how a convergence of technological and economic factors—particularly the rapidly falling cost of communication—is enabling a change in business organizations as profound as the shift to democracy in governments. For the first time in history it will be possible to have the best of both worlds—the economic and scale efficiencies of large organizations, and the human benefits of small ones: freedom, motivation, and flexibility.
This talk outlines:
• Four decentralized organizational structures—loose hierarchies, democracies, external markets, and internal markets—that will be enabled by technology but centered around enduring human values.
• The shift from “command-and-control” management to “coordinate-and-cultivate,” and the new skills that will be required to succeed.
• A framework for determining if a company’s situation is ripe for decentralizing and which organizational structure would be most effective
Speaker: Thomas W. Malone

Session 3 - Swarm Creativity, Feb 10, 4:00-5.30 pm, SHARE, 420 Broadway, Cambridge ,
This session discusses innovation by self-organization and swarm creativity. Teams of open source software developers demonstrate those cultural elements in an exemplary fashion. Guest speakers: Christoph Von Arb and Pascal Marmier, SHARE: Swiss House of Advanced Research and Education, Cambridge will talk about “Creating a virtual hub of innovation”. download Swarm Creativity Presentation

Chapter 8, Gloor
Bonabeau, E. Meyer, C. 2001. Swarm Intelligence: A Whole New Way to Think about Business. Harvard Business Review, May 2001O’Mahony, S. Guarding the commons: how community managed software projects protect their work. Research Policy 32, 2003. 1179-1198.
Moon, J.Y. Sproull, L. 2000. The essence of distributed work: the case of the Linux kernel. First Monday, vol. 5, no. 11 (November), http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue5_11/moon/
Debian Constitution, Constitution for the Debian Project (v1.2). http://www.debian.org/devel/constitution
Eclipse Project Charter. http://www.eclipse.org/eclipse/eclipse-charter.html

Session 4 – DNA of COINs, Feb 15, 8.15-9.45am
Cultural elements of organizations nurturing the innovation process are identified. Examples from history illustrate how creativity, collaboration, and communication - in networks of people - have advance civilization through to some of the greatest innovations of all time. Guest speaker: Stefano Mazzocchi, inventor of Apache-Cocoon and member of Apache Foundation, to talk about "motivation and modes of cooperation among open source developers." download DNA Presentation

Chapter 9, Gloor
Shepherd, Gordon, Shepherd, Gary. 2002. The Family in Transition: The Moral Career of a New Religious Movement. CESNUR Conference, Salt Lake City, June 25

Session 5 - Ethical Codes in Small Worlds, Feb 17, 8.15-9.45am
Coordination in Collaborative Innovation Networks (COINs) is controlled by an ethical code, leading to a definition of roles and communication patterns. This session then introduces the concept of collaborating and communicating in Small World Networks, where hubs of trust connect different virtual communities.
Guest speaker: Bill Ives, former Knowledge Management Practice leader at Accenture will talk about “My Blog is my social network”. download Ethical Code Presentation

Chapter 10, Gloor
Watts, D.J. Strogatz, S.H. 1998. Collective dynamics of 'small-world' networks, Nature, 393:440-442 (1998), http://tam.cornell.edu/SS_nature_smallworld.pdf
Cummings, J., Cross, R. 2003. Structural properties of work groups and their consequences for performance. Social Networks, 25(3), 197-210

Session 6 - Real Life Examples & COIN Communication Technologies, Feb 22, 4.30-6.00pm large conference room, NE20-336, Center for Coordination Science
This session extends the discussion of creativity, collaboration, and communication by adding two foundational elements: culture and technology. It shows how new communication technologies have pushed COINs to the tipping point. Aspects of online behavior are discussed. download Communication Technology Presentation


Chapters 11-13 of Gloor
Chesbrough, H. W. 2003. A Better Way to Innovate, Harvard Business Review July.
Greve, Arent. 2004. Creativity in Social Networks: Combining Knowledge in Innovations INSNA SUNBELT XXIV conference, Portoroz, Slovenija, May 12-16

Session 7 – TeCFlow Lab, Feb 24, 4.30-6.00pm, large conference room, NE20-336, Center for Coordination Science
This session describes the full functionality of the TeCFlow tool, including the different views (static view, dynamic view, netgraph view), and the different data sources: e-mail, online mailing lists, web sites, blogs, web searches, multidimensional data.download TeCFlow Presentation

Session 8 – The CKN Ecosystem, March 1, 8.15-9.45am, large conference room, NE20-336, Center for Coordination Science
This session introduces the Collaborative Knowledge Networks (CKN) ecosystem, consisting of collaborating virtual communities of practice, such as Collaborative Innovation Networks (COIN), Collaborative Learning Networks (CLN), and Collaborative Interest Networks (CIN). We will also discuss the “Deloitte virtual e.Xpert consulting practice” case. Guest speaker: Adriaan Jooste, CKN practice lead, Deloitte. download CKN Presentation

Chapter 14, Gloor
von Hippel, Eric. 2002 „Horizontal Innovation Networks – by and for Users“ MIT Sloan School of Management Working Paper 4366-02 (June) http://web.mit.edu/evhippel/www/Publications.htm
Wenger, E. Snyder, W. 2000. Communities of Practice: The Organizational Frontier. Harvard Business Review January.

Session 9 – Temporal Communication Flow Analysis Lab(TeCFlow), March 3
There wil be no offical class that day.
Students are expected to analyze a dataset of their own choice to collect experience with the TeCFlow tool.

Session 10 – Knowledge Flow Optimization, March 8 4.30-6.00pm, large conference room, NE20-336, Center for Coordination Scienc
In this session, Knowledge Flow Optimization (KFO) to optimize the knowledge flow of organizations is introduced and applied. download KFO Presentation


Chapter 16, Gloor
Chapter 15, Gloor
Tyler, Josh, Wilkinson, Dennis, Huberman, Bernardo A. 2003. Email as Spectroscopy: Automated Discovery of Community Structure within Organizations. HP Laboratories, http://www.hpl.hp.com/shl/papers/email/index.html
Wasserman , S., Faust, K. 1994. Social Network Analysis : Methods and Applications. Cambridge University Press.

Session 11 - Mid-term Exam, March 10 4.30-6.00pm, large conference room, NE20-336, Center for Coordination Scienc
The first part of the exam consists of a brief presentation and hand-in solution description of the analysis students have done with their own mailbox or other e-mail archive they have chosen for TeCFlow analysis. The second part consists of a traditional in-class exam.

Consulting Project - Analysis of CKN Data, Part II of Consulting Project, March 29 – May 3
The second part of the seminar consists of CKN consulting project. You will complete a real consulting project, assessing and measuring CKNs at companies, leading to recommendations for improved collaboration. You will collect real-world communication data to be used in the CKN research project. Afterwards you will analyze the collected communication data, using TecFlow and social network analysis methods and upload the anonymized results into the CKN research project database.

Session 12 - Design for Interaction, March 29, 4.30-6.00 pm, large conference room, NE20-336, Center for Coordination Science
Professor Allen’s interdisciplinary work on communication patterns in the workplace continues to blaze new territory in architecture, organizational psychology, and information technology. Thomas Allen will introduce new systems using web tools and “smart” badges to analyze how information travels through a company. He will also talk about his groundbreaking research on communication in R&D organizations over the last thirty years, conveying invaluable lessons for our own communication analysis of host companies. Speaker: Thomas J. Allen.

Final Presentations May 5
Student teams will deliver a final presentation to the instructors and the class. They will also deliver a presentation to the organization they analyzed.