nuance intelligence

Nice to see people drinking the web 2.0 collaboration kool-aid in a good way.

The editors of Complexity and Social Networkers, a blog from the Institute for Quantiative Social Science and the Program on Netwoked Governance at Harvard, had begun a comprehensive search for social network analysis tools and libraries. Not having found a single wellspring, they posted their findings on Wikipedia, and called for others to help fill it in. As they explain,

Our rationale here is that no single Web editor or researcher needs to carry the burden of building and/or maintaining such a collection, but collectively this goal can be achieved with very little individual effort.
Wikipedia has an elaborated site on Social networks (the Social network analysis site is automatically redirected there). We started to expand the network analytic section by adding a table – which was moved by the community within a day to a new page now called Social Network Analysis Software that allows everyone to add a tool along with a URL, short description, unique feature, platform it runs on, price.
We hereby invite the social network community members to add their tools and/ or to edit/ fill some of the cells in the table.

I like this for three reasons:

1. It challenges the traditional ivory tower mentality in the Ivy League.
2. It uses the web 2.0 tools to help people use web 2.0 tools.
3. It encourages the kind of collaboration that creates new forms of wealth.

Now I’ll have to go figure out why so few of the tools aren’t in there, and then go add them myself.