What makes teams successful? A Network Science Perspective

Abstract

The convergence of social and technical systems provides us with a wealth of log data that capture the structure and dynamics of social organizations. It is tempting to utilize these data to better understand how social organizations evolve, how collaboration and communication patterns are related to their “success” or “failure”, and how the position of individuals in social networks affects their performance, motivation, and productivity.

Considering examples from Open Source Software communities, scientific collaborations and peer-review processes, in this talk I will show how publicly available online data can be used to better understand how human and social aspects influence the success or failure of individuals as well as social organizations. I further exemplify how we can creatively use massive online data and network science methods to test hypotheses at the intersection of computational social science, organizational theory, and management science.