People-concepts networking

From AMI@Work Communities Wiki

People-concepts networking or people-concepts connectivity or people-concepts connection is a new concept representing the mapping of people and their relationships with existing concepts. Documents or content in a general meaning could also be related to concepts. The idea of “People-concepts Networking” is based on the Group Forming Networks created by David P. Reed which says, essentially, that networks that facilitate easy group and community forming are subject to potentially exponential growth. In “People-concepts Networking” there is a physical network, in fact the Internet, and people (e.g. eProfessionals) having the opportunity to easily form groups and communities.

However, there is nothing at all automatic about it. It is what potentially can happen. But useful groups don’t necessarily form just because it is possible for them to do so. The Question is how to help people in forming eGroups and eCommunities?

People-concepts is promoting a semantic based description of people relationships with concepts they know and regularly manipulate (for sure a concept may be also linked to other concepts and therefore to other people as well) and then one can get a map of people related to a concept with a certain degree of people closeness depending on whether they are directly related to this concept or to related overall or sub-concepts.

So, it means that you can search or visualise resulting people-concepts maps where to navigate the information and find opportunities to form groups or communities for collaborating on a specific purpose without consuming a lot of your time to localise who could be the right people or right concepts and in function of what they are supposed to be.

For sure "concept" is quite abstract as it could be anything but we can take the following as examples: Visualisation is one concept, Knowledge is another concept, and Knowledge-visualisation is quite a new concept existing just from few years ago to describe a new research domain which bring together visualisation and knowledge concepts.

I do believe that the right place to formalise concepts are communities (semantic description of concepts for sure). To link people with concepts there are several possible way to do that, either to scan their documents or to scan their emails and so on (data-mining techniques), or to have people profile where concepts of great interest are mentioned or linked to their communities where concepts are formalised.

Now, if I want to search people who are related to Knowledge-visualisation, I've just to run a query and will get back a map of people that have some degree of relationship either directly with Knowledge-visualisation, or indirectly with knowledge or visualisation and so on with KM (overall concept of knowledge) or visualisation-map (sub-concept of visualisation). Visualising and navigating (exploring) such people-concepts maps would be fascinating. Looking at how fast and efficient it could be to identify someone or several persons that could collaborate with you to achieve a common purpose.

In my view, “people-concepts map” is also an interesting artefact to extend the Johari window model for getting access to or being connected with others' knowledge. It would really be fascinating to see where it could lead us.