Sociocorpus

I expect that JL Moreno would have agreed that he was concerned with:

the collective value of all “social networks” [who people know] and the inclinations that arise from these networks to do things for each other ["norms of reciprocity"]

This is the definition of “Social Capital” from the website for Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam’s 2000 investigation of social capital trends in US society.

It accurately describes the business that GroupSense is in.

This infovis article on Collaborative Filtering provides a good summary of various approaches to ACF and concludes that :

“Memory Based algorithms outperform the others in yield and quality of preference prediction. It turns out, on the other hand, that they are the most conceptually simple and the easiest to implement, too.”

Effectively, if you have enough data about people’s preferences, you can predict someone’s preference for an object they haven’t rated from how the object is rated by other people who have similar preference profiles.

People who like what you like (your “taste buddies” in Walter Logeman’s words), also like this.

Psychodrama and Sociometry contribute significantly to the theoretical and methodological underpinnings of GroupSense online collaboration services. More than that, though, they provide the vision and inspiration for this work of increasing collaboration in social systems.

JL Moreno’s goal was the maximum spontaneous participation of every individual concerned in the groups in which they live.

This excerpt from Moreno’s writing is as applicable to work, learning and knowledge-sharing groups as to any:

“…we have to consider every individual in [their] concreteness and not as a symbol, and every relationship [they may] have…. we cannot gain a full knowledge unless every individual participates spontaneously in uncovering these relationships to the best of [their] ability. The problem is how to elicit from every [person their] maximum spontaneous participation. … how to motivate [people] so that they all will give repeatedly and regularly, not only at one time or another, their maximum spontaneous participation.”

Thanks for this quote to Sara Crane, President of the Canterbury Westaland Branch of the Australain New Zealand Psychodrama Association.