I've been reading some of the entries in Judith Meskill's recent flurry of posts on autonomic or self-healing social and kowledge networks. In her Feb. 26th post Judith writes about social networking systems (SNSes) as having the potential to add real value to our lives by improving the associations we make through them. She poses the following questions, given the current offering of SNSes, suggesting that the evolution of these systems should be naturally tied to our expectations of how they can improve our lives, a point I agree with completely. She asks, "how have SNS offerings reduced traffic congestions at the crossroads of your life" and "how can we influence social networking services so we can enhance our communications".

These are good questions to be asking at this active stage of SNS development. Additionally, this makes me wonder not only how SNSes will improve the lives of active users, but how this new technology-dependent form of social interaction will affect the less socially proactive members of an information ecology. In a given finite ecology, within a company for example, individuals might benefit from the social connections they make, forming communities of practice and rings of expert peers, but what of less connected peers working in isolation. Are they doomed to miss connections and cost the company in errors and missed opportunities? This reminds me of the types of missed connections that might occur in scientific (esp. Medical) research, where scientists working in isolation invent new ideas that fail to match up with needs in different areas of research. Good connections in this scenario could at times lead to life benefitting consequences.

I wonder about the impact of social and knowledge networks on professional development. In an enterprise's information ecology where a SNS is in place, are less connected folks doomed to some form of natural selection where the least sophisticated individuals with regard to understanding and using SNSes will be rendered less productive than peers who they might otherwise equal in skills and therefore less essential? What will this mean to the knowledge ecology if anything? That these people will need to learn to sink or swim if they hope to do compete in this environment? This is interesting to me because the idea of enhanced communication is also very much related to expert finding and recommender systems -- systematic or autonomic methods for connecting individuals by understanding attributes that describe and relate them. I haven't begun to look that closely at this literature, but I wonder how systems propose to alter the strength of associations between individuals based on extractable information about a person, e.g. what topics she is interested in, who she works with, what she has published, etc. For me, the promise might be that perhaps SNSes that are smart enough might help connect these less proactive indiviudals, especially those holding vast knowledge potential for the enterprise.

Cleary there is an opportunity for autonomic SNSes to support individuals that may be less proactive at making the social, business or knowledge connections themselves, but whose connectedness would benefit the active users and the ecology as a whole as much as it would help these inactive individuals. Applications that simply help us by extending and improving the social networking we do in the real world is wonderful, but the real promise, I think, seems to be in making / suggesting those connections that are much more difficult to initiate without the aid of sophisticated computer algorithms.