Visualization of Communication Patterns in Collaborative Innovation Networks - Analysis of Some W3C Working Groups

  • Authors:

  • Peter A. Gloor;Rob Laubacher;Scott B. C. Dynes;Yan Zhao

  • Affiliations:

  • MIT Center for Coordination Science;MIT Center for Coordination Science;Dartmouth Tuck Center for Digital Strategies;Dartmouth College

  • Venue:
  • CIKM '03 Proceedings of the twelfth international conference on Information and knowledge management
  • Year:
  • 2003

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Abstract

Collaborative Innovation Networks (COINs) are groups of self-motivated individuals from various parts of an organization or from multiple organizations, empowered by the Internet, who work together on a new idea, driven by a common vision. In this paper we report first results of a project that examines innovation networks by analyzing the e-mail archives of some W3C (WWW consortium) working groups. These groups exhibit ideal characteristics for our purpose, as they form truly global networks working together over the Internet to develop next generation technologies. We first describe the software tools we developed to visualize the temporal communication flow, which represent communication patterns as directed acyclic graphs, We then show initial results, which revealed significant variations between the communication patterns and network structures of the different groups., We were also able to identify distinctive communication patterns among group leaders, both those who were officially appointed and other who were assuming unofficial coordinating roles.