Mapping NTEN
April 2nd, 2007 by Michael Gilbert
Over the next few days, I will be attending the annual Nonprofit Technology Conference, put on by the Nonprofit Technology Enterprise Network, of which I was the founding president. With any luck, I’ll be blogging about the conference regularly right here.
As befits this blog and the essential nature of a conference, I’ll be focusing on the theme of connection. To kick that off, I sought the help of Richard Rogers of Govcom.org and the Issue Crawler tool. While this by no means represents the entire universe of NTEN’s organizational network, it’s a snapshop of the kinds of connections that are revealed from the online connections between NTEN members.
The Issue Crawler is a sophisticated tool that I’m just barely starting to understand. I’m not sure that it’s well suited to large networks such as NTEN, but as the maps show, it does a very interesting job tracking who links to whom and displaying that in useful ways. If you want to learn more about it, you can start with a short movie.
I’m very interested in other maps of this nature, especially as related to the large network of organizations that are applying ICT to challenges of social change work. If you have any suggestions, please make them in the comments!
Fascinating. What sites did you see the crawl with?
I randomly selected 300 of the 800 or so urls that represent the home pages of NTEN member organizations. Although I’m still not entirely conversant in the settings and procedures of the Issue Crawler, I understand that it reached a limit of 100 co-links and then rendered the SVG file from which the larger image above is derived. I’ll be playing a bit more with the tool as I learn more. I think what would be interesting is to identify small cohorts of organizations to map, but to go deeper with the crawl. I’m tempted to try some other tools as well or publish results that other folk have run.
Brilliant and thought provoking.
Clearly has potential to be deeply flawed because of this same power, however.
I’ll give you a dollar if you read up on this tool and publish a map that you feel is as accurate as this type of thing can be.
I’m back from the Nonprofit Technology Conference and I have a backlog of posts to finish up. I plan on using NTEN as a case study for further mapping exercises, but I don’t want to ignore the comments and questions here.
I’ll give you a dollar if you read up on this tool and publish a map that you feel is as accurate as this type of thing can be.
We will see, but I do hope to take you up on that. My first goal is to try to refine the crawl in order to accomplish the same general goal that I had with this first attempt: I want to understand the extent to which there are online connections between NTEN members.
I believe that it is in NTEN’s interests to expand and enrich the connections between its members. There are a great many ways to do this, including applying peer review to more of NTEN’s work, but starting with a snapshot of what online connections might already be in place would be a good start. I would be pleased if this could contribute in some meaningful way to NTEN’s organizational capacity building, but I’m not in the loop on that so my timeline here will be based on my own curiosity and available time.