Networks are everywhere and yet it’s still a very abstract concept. Together with our colleagues from Transnomia Institute we put together a special workshop that offers a very tangible experience of networks to the participants. As a result, they get intuitive and embodied knowledge of various network structures and learn to extend their social skills beyond the common patterns and codes of behavior.
re:publica is “Germany’s largest and most prominent conference on the future of our society and all things digital”. This year’s theme is action and will focus on how digital technologies bring people together to affect social and political change. Here is the slide show and some photos from our session at re:publica conference that took place on the 4th of May 2012 in Berlin. A big thank you to everyone who came to the talk and for the interesting conversations afterwards!
This is a report on the experiment that Nodus Labs conducted on some of the more active Russian protest Facebook groups formed after the rigged Russian election in 2011. We made two network visualizations for three different protest groups over a period of one month in order to observe their dynamics. We found that the most influential members of these groups were not too politically engaged before the elections and were mainly journalists, students, event organizers, and media workers. We also found that the groups formed around ideological causes (such as “Putin must leave”) stagnated in their development in January 2012, while the groups formed around a call for active participatory actions (“Volunteers for the fair elections”) have grown in size and density considerably, building a very well connected and yet open network that was able to bring many new members together around their cause.
In this post we will demonstrate how one can analyze any Facebook group or profile using a combination of freely available tools. We will take as an example the recent Russian protest movement against rigged elections. Recently there have been many groups popping up on Facebook bringing people together around certain goals and tasks of the movement: self-organized activist groups producing promo materials, singing petition against Vladimir Putin, organizing demonstration for fair elections in Berlin, Germany.
In order to maintain a certain degree of openness and flexibility that would extend beyond the short-term goals, professional networks must practise “inclusive exclusivity” – that is, maintain tightly-knit clusters but only temporarily, allowing for the new individuals and communities to enter from the periphery towards the center of the network. Nodus Labs research based on the study of PAF and INPEX – two cultural networks working in the field of contemporary dance. November, 2011.
