Track: Collaboration Systems and Technology
Minitrack: Social Networks and Collaboration

Social networks provide an abstraction that can represent almost any type of human interaction. There are over 40 years of empirical results that have helped us better understand and manage regions, organizations and individuals. Computer technology has aided this effort by providing the ability to visualize, analyze and simulate social networks. In addition, collaborative software may influencing the structure and dynamics of some social networks. This minitrack invites papers on social networks as they relate to information systems, including business processes, network analysis of collaborative software data, simulation of social links by analogy and other methods on the WWW, semantic networks, and knowledge networks. The track is also open to new analytic approaches: including the use of simulation. Thus the track encourages participation by those developing new algorithms for analyzing social networks, as well as those seeking to visualize and model networks and their growth in new ways.

Topics and research areas include, but are not limited to:
* Distribution of knowledge - studies about how people make descisions based on advice networks
* Innovation - organization network structure of innovation, how structure affects innovation
* Productivity - organiztional network structure that affects productivity
* Tools - tools that map, track or visualize social networks to provide management decision support
* Case studies of using social network analysis
* Effect of network density on quality - Innovation is doing things differently, quality often means doing things the same. This will be research on how network density affects quality
* Organizational network measurement - ways of tracking and mapping the social networks in organizations
* Organizational network education - How network knowledge affects management decsions, productivy or innovation
* Organizational knowledge sharing - tools that aid sharing of knowledge through social networks
* Simulating organizational growth
* Characteriizing the dynamics of social networks
* The emergence of network structure from local collaboration
* The modeling of networks composed of humans and machines

Co-chairs:
Donald Steiny (Primary C ontact)
Department of Information Processing Science
University of Oulu
Rakentajantie 3, 90570 Oulu , Finland
Phone: +358-8-553-1900
Fax: +358-8-553-1890
Email: steiny@infopoint.com

Jeffrey Nickerson
Stevens Institute of Technology
Castle Point on Hudson, Hoboken, NJ 07030, USA
Phone: 201 216 8124
Email: jnickerson@stevens.edu

Harri Oinas-Kukkonen
Department of Information Processing Science
University of Oulu
Rakentajantie 3, 90570 Oulu , Finland
Direct Phone: +358-8-553-1914
Departmental Phone: +358-8-553-1900
Fax: +358-8-553-1890
Email: Harri.Oinas-Kukkonen@oulu.fi