I was also presenting a poster at Group on a project I worked on while at Sun Microsystems Laboratories. The application is called Constellation and it uses social network visualization techniques to reveal to users the location and relationships between experts and novices in an organization.

Joan DiMicco, Nicole Yankelovich. (2007) “Constellation: Using Visualization to Find the Path to Experts.” Poster Presentation at the ACM Conference on Organizational Computing and Goupware Technologies (GROUP 2007), Nov 2007.

Constellation application screenshot

This image is a screenshot of Constellation. The nodes are people and the lines are the relationships. The social network relationships shown are the management structure, co-authoring history of internal and external documents, patenting history, and neighboring offices. The blue lines (the thicker lines) represent multi-dimensional relationships, meaning the pair are connected in multiple ways, such as both authoring and patenting together. The user can turn any of these relationships on/off at will.

What I think is cool about Constellation is that you can figure out the relationships between experts in a topic area, for example here the experts in “hardware” are shown in the screenshot. There are two hardware research clusters in Sun Labs that have done a lot of work together, but haven’t done any collaboration across each other. The weak linkages between these two clusters of researchers is a tie that says “sits near.” So if you wanted to begin to have these groups work together (by writing papers or patents together), the first step is to go to the people who have the “sits near” relationship and get them to start talking to each other.

The proposed use of Constellation is for novices. If I add myself (a novice in “hardware”) to the graph, I can see the shortest relationship path between myself and the experts already shown. By exploring the relationships between these experts and myself, I can figure out the best way to get a personal introduction to an expert in hardware.

Users have so much knowledge about who they know and who they comfortable asking for help from that is NOT captured electronically, that I think the strength of Constellation is leaving the ultimate decision of who to contact entirely up to the user. Rather than presenting the user with a ranked list of mysteriously calculated “hardware experts,” this interface lets the user visually explore the social network space and selectively focus in on the persons of interest.

(I also wrote about an extension of this project for the CHI 2007 Shared Encounters Workshop, “Enriching Encounters with Social Networks.“)