During this session, we will share concepts about complex systems in a social network context. We also will discuss how the role of either a person or institution, the flow, the quality, and the access to the information is vital to the knowledge of the network members. The examples will be applied using the software Gephi, which is distributed under GNU Licenses. We will also work in groups to build our own example of a network. The session participants will vote in an element of his own group, and each group also will choose one institution that they trusty the most to provide information to them. A graph to represent the network will be done, and we will share points of view to make clear the understanding of roles and the flow of information.
Goals of this session
The purpose of this session is to contribute to the understanding of how social networks are build and how the roles and the flow of information are important to give the same oppotunity of all network members to access the information that could be transformed in knowledge.
ACTIVITIES
We build our own network about what were the sources of information that sessions’ members considered trustful enough to get information from.
We shared some concepts about the roles in the network based on Social Network Analysis:
* Outdegree
* Indegree
* Closeness
* Density
* Betweenness
* Frequency
Each one of those concepts were discussed in terms of their behavior, actions to improve the network information flow and some challenges that must be faced. We concluded talking a little bit about the narrow line between using those concepts to build a better network structure in order to balance the information flow and the power of the concepts to control the network. This understanding is critical to internet health!