Introduction to New Directions in Collaboration and Social Networks

Abstract

This mini-track solicited papers that explore social networks, the social graph and social influence. We received 14 papers and from them selected seven. We favored empirical papers that observe or visualize social relation and social graphs; theoretical papers that simulate society through software, design research that addresses social network-based software and information systems and other papers with empirical studies of social influence and social web. Social networks have been used to model a wide variety of phenomena and we were fortunate to get a selection of papers that showed the diversity of possible uses. Though all the papers are concerned with social behavior, on one end of the spectrum were papers that leaned towards interaction that is mediated by the Web to a paper that did not involve the Web at all and considers the social networks of organizations. The paper Provider-Independent Online Social Identity Management Enhancing Privacy Consistently Across Multiple Social Networking Sites by Moritz Riesner and Gunther Pernul of the University of Regensburg was one that that leaned towards Webmediated interaction by developing a model of identity management that works across social network sites. Two papers used social networking sites to investigate aspects of social behavior. In What’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander” Knowledge and Social Networks in Yahoo! Answers by Sheizaf Rafaeli and Amit Rechavi of Sagy Center for Internet Research Graduate School of Management, Univ. of Haifa the authors use Yahoo Answers to show a relationship between the type of knowledge being sought and membership in social networks. In the second, Following Trendsetters: Collective Decisions in Online Social Networks by Yasuaki Sakamoto of Stevens Institute of Technology, the author used results from the statistical analyses and computer simulations of Digg users’ voting behavior to reveal that users filter out stories using the choices of trendsetters, rather than using the majority decisions. Another exciting paper Social Media and Warning Response Impacts in Extreme Events: Results from a Naturally Occurring Experiment by Yulia Tyshchuk, Cindy Hui, Martha Grabowski and William Wallace all with a common affiliation with Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, used social networking sites in a different way, to employ social media as part of the warning response process in a naturally occurring disaster. Self-Organized Service Management in Social Systems by Elena del Val, Miguel Rebollo and Vicente Botti of DSIC used agent-based modeling to show how using the network principle of homophily can help create efficient self-organized structures in a network of services in which agents are linked to similar agents, improving the search process and how the network adapts itself to a known service distribution. Alireza Abbasi and Liaquat Hossain of the University of Sydney found that the impact factor of papers is higher with collaboration by examining networks of co-authorship in Relationship between Research Impact and Researchers’ Institutional and National Level Collaborations in the field of ‘Information Science’. In a paper that was pure social network research, Network Structure or Tie Content? The Impact of Managerial Networks on Career Outcomes and Influence by Nicoline Scheidegger of Zurich University of Applied Sciences ZHAW the author used surveys to discover the social networks in a Swiss service firm. Her analysis supports and expands the theory that use of structural holes in network affects career advancement. It has been very gratifying to see the excellent evidence-based work that has been done by these scholars and we appreciate their important contributions. 2012 45th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences