Often new ideas and insights as well as warnings about potential threats come from informal contacts rather than from formal meetings. The trouble is that existing IT systems are geared towards reinforcing separate silos rather than building bridges between them.
Services such as Yammer and Chatter create a more open workplace by letting people see what others are working on and encouraging sharing. The upshot is that good ideas can emerge from anywhere.
Sociologist James Coleman calls these informal contacts weak ties as opposed to â€œstrong ties which would represent ones relationship with close friends and family. For Coleman, as is mentioned in the Economist quote, â€œweak tiesâ€ are what help us find new and unknown opportunities that fall outside of our initial comprehension of our surrounding environment.
The potential for social networking services to change the relationship between silos does not just exist within the corporate word, it also exists in city neighborhoods, where sociologists and urban design practitioners recognize a lack of public space for people to interact and establish weak ties.
Looking at neighborhood based social networking sites like Neighbors for Neighbors (NfN) in Boston, we see a complementary space for daily interactions that promotes the opportunity for people to engage in informal contacts and find new information that may help them.
When sociologists like Robert Putnam link the decline of social capital to the decline of peoples use of public space, we see why there is so much excitement around the potential of social networking sites. However in order for these sites to really transform the landscape of city neighborhoods, issues of access and achieving critical mass have to be addressed. Going forward, its is the collaborative work of technologists, community organizers, and urban design practitioners who will have to look at the ways to both increase the awareness of such social networks amongst residents, encourage their use of the sites, and most importantly, improve access to them.
The value of neighborhood based social networking sites is based on their visibility. While issues of access will take a while to remedy, working to increase peoples awareness of such sites will help to boost the culture of collaboration on the sites and in the end make the site a valuable asset to the community.