this week's interviewing

Please reply in the comments with groups you intend to interview.

Questions to ask them

1. Have you/are you interested in volunteering or working in Somerville?
2. If yes, what kind of project or work was it? What services or educational resources are you providing in Somerville?
3. What "economic recovery assets" do/could you bring to Somerville?
4. How large is your organization on campus?
5. What other groups are you connected with on campus? What about off campus?
6. What is your most permanent contact information? (Group e-mail address, website)
7. (If relevant) What is your perception of the economic crises as it pertains to Somerville?

Tags to use

1. Education
2. Services
3. Volunteer
4. Potential
5. Actual
6. Tufts student
7. Media
8. Other (use lots of tags)

Tufts Daily

Today, I added the Tufts Daily, the campus newspaper, as a node on the map. While creating the node, I realized it provided a very different service than most Tufts organizations. Most of the original organizations I considered interviewing provide volunteers or education. Although the Daily has a staff of over 100, its greatest service is not potential volunteers, but rather its ability as press to spread messages, publicize events, and publish advertisements. With papers already being distributed in Davis Square as well as Tufts, the Daily has a lot of potential to help with economic recovery efforts. The stories and advertisements it publishes about the local community and Tufts students is a great way to link the two groups together. I find this particularly relevant when thinking about the discussions the class had last week on ways students could feel more connected to what is going on outside of the Tufts campus. More broadly, while working on this node, I realized that media serves an entirely different purpose than our current tags describe, which is why I suggest we might want to make a media tag.

Linked

I really enjoyed the first chapters of Albert-László Barabási’s book Linked: The New Science of Networks, because it made me approach the Internet in a manner I am not accustomed to. As a student with a perpetual fear of numbers and a lover of social studies, I didn’t think of the nodes in terms of math and graphs. This made me begin to think of the map in other ways too, and soon, I was reminded of one of my favorite books of all time, The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell.

A tipping point, according to Gladwell, is the point of critical mass, where change becomes unstoppable. Gladwell explains that the tipping point of social epidemics occur because of the involvement of a small percent of the participants of activities with particular skills. He proceeds to describe these three different types of people. First you need connectors, people with large social networks who have a knack for making friends and acquaintances (a great excerpt from the book to discover whether you are a connector can be found here: http://www.gladwell.com/tippingpoint/tp_excerpt2.html). Second, you need mavens, who are the “information specialists,” that others rely upon to discover new facts. Third, you need salesmen who are the charismatic persuaders.

After recalling the book, I began to apply the concepts to viral videos, the closest equivalent I could think of as an internet social epidemic, and it made sense. In my mind, I began to picture the nodes as different websites that served the three special purposes to make the video go viral. First, I imagined blogs as the website maven, picking up on the video when no one else but Internet specialists could find it. Then, I imagined a large media website like CNN.com picking up on the story from the blog, and acting as the persuader, legitimizing the video that the bloggers found. Finally, I see a social network like myspace.com or facebook.com acting as the connector spreading the video out to millions of people. During this exercise, a picture of interconnecting nodes began to develop in my head.

I am sure there are many different ways Gladwell’s book could be used and combined with web 2.0, and even those who are reading this post probably could interpret it differently. However, the point of this post is that Barabási’s book made me begin to realize how many different studies and theories exist which could be combined to provide a clearer picture of social networks.

Let's Get Ready

I am adding the organization "Let's Get Ready" to the map. Let's Get Ready is a student group that works with students at Somerville High School to prepare them for college. They run SAT tutoring sessions twice a week at the school and this year are incorporating a "College Choice" program which will help students decide on colleges to apply to and help them fill out the Common App.

This program is of particular interest during the recession because of the high costs that can be associated with SAT courses and college advising. It connects Tufts students, who have applied to college and generally been successful on their SATs, with those who are in need and may not be able to afford tutoring. The Tufts Let's Get Ready group is not affiliated organizations other than the Somerville schools, but it is part of a national network of 52 programs across the country.

More about Let's Get Ready here: http://www.letsgetready.org/

Institute of Political Citizenship

The Institute of Political Citizenship at the Jonathan M. Tisch College of Citizenship and Public Service—founded and managed by Tufts undergraduates—seeks to educate and motivate students to engage in state and local government to shape policies that address local community needs. Aware of the impact that grassroots advocacy can have on the greater political landscape, the Institute aims to develop future civic leaders through collaborative research, internships and relevant academic preparation.

Some of the main focuses of the institute are policy based internships with local legislators, voter registration drives, and community based policy projects. In the past few semesters, students have worked on projects in the area focused on low income housing, education policy with respect to immigrants, and budget defecit recovery.

The institute is always looking for new ways to get involved in our local communities, and pair students up with opportunities to make a difference.

Power Law vs. Bell Curve

Barabasi identifies a clear distinction between how networks function in reality and how we might assume they work. In real life, many things operate on the principle of a bell curve -- class grades, height and weight, annual income, and even age. The highest concentration of any statistic is in the middle. Following this pattern, it would be implied that network connections are also randomly generated and concentrated around the average. For example, Barabasi uses websites to illustrate connectivity. It would be expected that if 100 websites had an average of 25 links, a majority of those websites would fall within that 20-30 link range.

This theory is disproven, however, with the introduction of the power law. Barabasi's research shows that websites don't follow the law of averages, and neither do other networks. He acknowledges the role of connectors, or people and groups with an unusually high number of connections. These are the people that get things accomplished, and it is part of their nature to accumulate as many links as possible. These are the kinds of people that made the Kevin Bacon game possible and such a success.

The notion of the power law is unique, because most of our other behaviors fall within the bell curve. Barabasi offers the example of human height: in our world, most people fall between 5 and 6 feet, and it is rare to know many people far outside that range. This illustrates the bell curve theory beautifully. But following the power law, he says, in a world with 6 billion people, it is possible that one person among them could be 8,000 feet tall. It is difficult to grasp that idea and examine it in the context of networks, but Barabasi does a great job highlighting examples and making the point very clear.

Athletic Potential

Last week I posted based on the size of the group rendering a potential for service. This week I continued with that motive, and rather than reporting on a group I was 100% unfamiliar with, I chose something I have more of a grasp of. Although I'm no longer a collegiate athlete, when I was one a few years ago I remember our team of 80 young men organizing a community service event... pathetically. It wasn't a lack of desire to give back, rather a lack of motivation to take the initiative set up a relationship: none of the athletes wanted to go out of their way to set up a worthwhile community service. Eventually we set up a relationship with a local school, and eventually we sent a few players each week... eventually nobody took the lead and players stopped participating.
I'm posting Tufts Athletics because, similar to Hillel reaching a huge percentage of the Tufts student body, it reaches a large demographic. Moreover, I think that my experience with the football team would have been different if a local organization or representative could have found us on the map, proposed a community service project, and organized for the athletes (rather than the athletes doing it on their own). I think somebody with a cause would happily say to a group of Tufts athletes: "sign on up with your teammates and friends-- all you have to do is show up and donate some time, we'll take care of the logistics."
The hurdle would be contacting the teams, but I think that the Tufts Athletic Dept. main office could easily set up a bulletin board with community service opportunities that coaches going in-and-out of the office could pass on to their team captains... etc.

Identifying Hubs

In discussing the nature of the Internet and its network of interconnected nodes, Barabási distinguishes hubs as the most important feature of a network that shortens the paths between any two nodes. He finds that these hubs “dominate the structure of all networks in which they are present, making them look like small worlds…[because] with links to an unusually large number of nodes, hubs create short paths between any two nodes in the system” (64). Within our own project, I think it is important that we keep these ideas in mind while creating our map of Somerville. In order to be most thorough and time-efficient, I think we should approach our mapping more strategically: we should first identify the “hubs” within our own network (for example, LCS would be one within Tufts student groups). Once we have identified the most significant ones, each of us could become an expert on a specific “hub,” obtaining all relevant information (such as all those organizations that are linked to it within one step). As Barabási claims, the hubs are “ubiquitous, a generic building block of our complex, interconnected world” (63). In that sense, identifying the major “hubs” that will be included on our map first will greatly facilitate the process of finding nodes as well as classifying the different links between them.

Classes referencing materials from other classes which reference materials from other classes, everything is converging. My "Innovative Social Enterprises" class just read a case study about Jumpstart, the organization for which I added a node to our social network map and the reading for my "Media and Society" class is about web 2.0 and the ability of social networking software to connect people and organizations in ways that were not possible with out the internet. All of that is just to say that this class is at the right place at the right time. While one class is talking about social enterprises and another class is talking about how the internet is revolutionizing information sharing, we are at the heart of it all connecting the two of them together. It is exciting to say the least.