Documenting Social Capital Using GTD and PersonalBrain
How would you document your personal network? How far back would you go: college, high school, nursery school? How would you indicate who knows whom and in which context? How would you get this out of your head so that you could analyze the network?
These and other questions came up as I started to think about documenting my personal network. I immediately noticed that the information relating to my personal network was just “stuff” in the GTD sense. Some information was in my head. Some information was also spread across multiple sources such as numerous phone books, planners, business cards, software such as Outlook, hardware such as cell phones, computers, old Palm PDAs, my new PocketPC PDA etc. I used the In-Basket to Empty process followed my a quick
MindSweep to get a fairly detailed listing.
I’m an avid MindMapper, but in this case I did not think that a tool such as FreeMind or MindManager might suffice owing to the inherent tree-like structure of a mind map. While it is possible to create linkages between nodes, there is no capability to capture semantic information on the arcs. I also looked at Concept Maps (a really great package can be found here),
but the visuals got fairly crowded quickly. So I kept on searching and came across a package called PersonalBrain. This package seems to have merit for this kind of task as one can make multiple associations to build a network-like structure. PersonalBrain comes with a 30 day trial so I downloaded and installed the package. They have a really good online tutorial that gives you a good picture on how to use the tool, and so half an hour later I started to
build my network.
I wanted to capture not only the people in my network and their relationships to other people, schools, groups, clubs, activities, companies and locations. Fortunately PersonalBrain allows the user to represent any kind of abstraction as a node. A node in PersonalBrain is called a “thought”. Thoughts can have multiple parents, multiple children as well as special connections called jump points. You can even create new thought types and link types to capture semantic information. I created a new thought
type called “Person” and some link types: “knows” and “should be introduced” for example.
I started to map out locations by country, then region (states in the US), and then by city. Then I created a list of all the schools, groups, clubs, activities and so on and identified their location. Finally, for each person I linked them to their pertinent nodes and then created links between the people so that I could document who knows whom etc. As each individual was added to the map, I fleshed out the semantic details of the association and annotated the links.
As an example, I can pull up a geographic location, see all the clubs, schools, organizations, corporations etc. associated with people I know. Conversely, I can select a person and see their hobbies, schools attended, places worked. I can have fairly detailed notes associated with any one of these “thoughts”. PersonalBrain has search features, I have not had the time to explore the capabilities. One thing you can do is to find all thoughts by type, so I can get a list of all the people I know.
When you step back and look at your immediate network, and the second level network (people that your immediate network know) the richness and diversity is staggering. In the spirit of building Social Capital, you can examine your relationships and ask how you add value to each of the relationships that already exist, as well as how you could add value to a relationship you would like to create. Once you have a network documented, you can make all sorts of powerful connections: I found three people
who do not know each other right now, and they share the same set of hobbies including a passion for golf. I’m thinking of setting up a foursome soon. Fore!
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November 7th, 2006 20:38
Great stuff - I use FreeMind (I posted a pic of my network a while back). I agree - it needs to be a graph (not a tree), and needs to support attributes on nodes *and* edges. I’d also add the need to support semi-structured information, e.g., not all “contacts” have a phone number.
May 22nd, 2008 12:59
This looks cool - I am going to check it out!