Social Connections IV community twitter graph

Another great Social Connections event full with brilliant speakers from all over the world has taken place this November 30th in Amsterdam. Social Connections IV had more attendees than ever (200) and was packed with three tracks of presentations by IBM'ers, business partners and customers solely about social business with IBM Connections.

As usual there is quite a bit of tweeting going on during an event, and Social Connections is no exception. The hashtag for the event is #soccnx. Doing some network analysis delivers a great graph of the Social Connections IV community. The graph displays all the connections between attendees (and even non-attendees) that have tweeted #soccnx.

Graph of #soccnx twitter network during Social Connections IV

Download a larger version of the graph to see more detail.

Social Connections community is tightly connected
The graph is compiled of 210 vertices (nodes) and 4010 edges (links). These are the twitter accounts and their connections to eachother. The average geodesic distance is 2,113666 and the maximum still only 4 - meaning that the Social Connections community is a tightly connected community. On average every person is only two links away and the maximum is 4 degrees of separation. So even less than the famous (unproven) theory 6 degrees of separation. Just exactly how close everybody involved is to one another is also apparent from the number of connected components: there are only 5 'subgraphs' of tweeters that are connected to each other but not to anyone in one of the other subgraphs.

When digging deeper into the table underlying the graph I can give some insight in various types of measures of the centrality of a vertex within a graph that determine the relative importance of a vertex within the graph 
(devided into degree, closeness centrality, betweenness centrality, eigenvector centrality and PageRank).

Top 20 vertices (tweeters) by Eigenvector Centrality

The top names are not surprising. They are the ones organising the event, speakers, IBM employees or very influential people in the IBM social business arena.

Testdrive IBM Connections 4 on October 4

sustainable highway to improve internal collaboration and knowledge

e-office would like to invite you to get acquainted with IBM Connections 4 - the latest version of the collaboration platform from IBM -on October 4.

IBM Connections is social software for the leading collaboration and knowledge sharing easy. The new version makes it possible to no longer work from your inbox. In Connections 4 are all sources of information and actions together. Connections 4 offers can also be integration with SharePoint, making it an integrated workplace for employees arises.

Are you ready for this way of working? Come experience Connections 4 and see for yourself. On October 4, you can use the software hands-on. Even if you do not know IBM Connections this is a great event to start discover the capabilities of the software.

As e-office, we are convinced that our future as effective, sustainable and profitable organizations lies in solutions that are possible with IBM Connections. On October 4, besides a test drive of Connections 4, we offer you an additional testdrive: in an electric car. All participants can drive several electric cars during lunch time. 

when:
Donderdag 4 oktober, 9.30 – 14.00 uur

where:
Elektrisch Vervoer Centrum Rotterdam, Delftseplein 24, Rotterdam

program:
9.30 uur    Reception in Rotterdam
9.45 uur    vision on social business  
                Roland Hameeteman, ceo e-office 
10.00 uur  introducing IBM Connections 
                Luis Benitez, social software product manager IBM
11.00 uur  break
11.15 uur  testdrive Connections 4  
                Sasja Beerendonk, social business strategist & trainer, e-office
12.45 uur  lunch & testdrive e-cars 
14.00 uur  roundup (and return e-cars) 

sign up

You can register via the registration form.

Do you have a preference for a particular electric car? Look here for the list of available vehicles and give your preference to us via the registration form!

Note: for the test drive yYou need a valid drivers license.

impression of UKLUG 2012

Last monday and tuesday I was at UKLUG, the UK Lotus User Group, which this year was being held at Cardiff University. First of all, Cardiff is a beautiful little city, located on the coast and the city centre very pedestrian and cycling friendly, with beautiful shops which unfortunately I didn't have time to visit.

As a speaker I did visit Cardiff Castle. We enjoyed a fun short tour of the castle followed by a dinner at the former servants area. A speakers dinner is a great way to get to know some of the other speakers and organisers. Since I am fairly new at this type of thing it's an excellent way of getting in touch so the first day of the event you feel a little familiar already.

At the first day some of the people had a little trouble finding this particular university building, so we started a little late. The opening presentation was done by Uffe Sorensen, Social Business and Collaboration Director of IBM Software Group, who took us on a tour from the early days of Lotus to the contemporary Notes Social Edition.

Some ofthe highlights of the two-day event for me were Simon Vaughn's and Jon Scott's presentation 'Targeting an Exceptional User experience - Connections in Education'. I loved how Cardiff is looking at 'what student excpect from their IT environment'. After all they are the employees of the future!

During lunch break the first day, Nerd Girls hosted by Gabriella Davies, organised a 'Spark Ideas' session. Kind of like TED talks. A short (5min) freeform talk started at Lotusphere 2012, from anyone who has an inspirational story to share. Really nice to attend. I hope they will be doing this again at Social Connections IV in Amsterdam on 30th of November.


For all the admins and developers there were plenty of technical sessions to attend by some great thought leaders from around the world, such as Paul Withers, John Head, Sharon Bellamy, Gabriella Davies, Paul Moony and many others. There were actually quite a few presentations on XPages, amongst which one of my colleague Frank van der Linden about 'Yellow and Blue stream - Make use of the Activity Stream, oAuth and XPages in your Social Business applications' . Also I enjoyed the two bickering brothers Roy and Tony Holder presenting their great HADSL FirM engine in 'User Management - How to improve service and security while reducing costs'. Ofcourse I won their give away iPad so I will love them forever.

I loved Mat Newman's session 'Lotus Notes, Yeah Baby, Yeah...'. In a very enthusiastic manner he talked about all the cool features of Lotus Notes. One thing struck me most: he said "if your users are not using it, it's your fault!" (receiving a hearhear from Susan Bulloch) Something I recognize very much. Often at user adoption sessions with clients on Lotus Notes I find a lot of the cool stuff not being properly implemented or known by IT. Take the Sidebar for example, which can be used for many great things by adding great widgets. Mat showed us some really nice widgets that can be installed in seconds which make work so much more efficient....and fun!

Mat wore a Yellow&Blue outfit, unknowingly (surely), advocating the e-office Yellow&Blue vision on the new way if working. So thanks for that Mat!

If ever you have time to attend one of her sessions, go see Susan Bulloch! She did two sessions of which I attended 'Troubleshooting C&S in Notes'. She dynamically presented about all the difficulties admins may encounter with Calendar and Scheduling in Lotus Notes. It seemed like the large group of attendees recognized the issues and she gave some great solutions on how to go about it. Allthough being an IBM'er, she wasn't shy to be critical of some things herself, while at the same time showing a deep love of Lotus Notes. I have to figure out how she was doing the remote control presenting from her iPhone!

The two days were so packed with interesting stuff, that it is impossible to mention everything. You really have to come see for yourself! Or go get the slides from the UKLUG website. In the meantime, you may want to attend some IBM sessions on Connections 4: september 19 in Amsterdam and september 25 in Brussels. Or join the Connections 4 testdrive on October 4 in Rotterdam (Netherlands), and ofcourse Social Connections IV on November 30 in Amsterdam! Plenty of events to learn more and meet people!