Sensing & Sensemaking

We use advanced analytics to drive our work – and enhance yours

Collective intelligence behavior is a network phenomenon. A smart community outperforms any of its members; this is the result of people working together, improving on each other’s work. So, we use graph theory, combined with ethnography, to access the wisdom of the crowd. You can think of it as an artificial intelligence whose components are human beings. Our methodology is based on what we call Semantic Social Networks . It has several advantages:

  • Robust to ill-defined questions. Exploratory questions are important. Who is doing the most interesting work on X? Which trends are emerging around Y? Free-form conversation minimizes framing biases and encourages serendipitous discovery.
  • Scalable . Edgeryders projects can result in large online conversations, with hundreds or thousands of participants. We use graph theory to aggregate them, and extract from them what is most important or unexpected.
  • Rigorous . Mining Semantic Social Networks yields qualitative and quantitative research. We apply network metrics to score and weigh the qualitative conclusions of ethnographers.
  • Beautiful and intuitive . Everything we do is a network, and networks are easy to visualize. In fact, most people find them intuitive and beautiful. We provide visualizations of our data with all our projects.

We develop and use our own Open Source tools for sensemaking and co-creation

An innovative suite of online software developed, customized and maintained by Edgeryders. The software has been developed in cooperation with leading universities and deployed in projects for the World Bank, United Nations Development Program. It has been supported by Grants from the Rockefeller foundation and funding for Horison2020 research.

Open Ethnographer: helps you to understand how communities make meaning and create culture, from the point of view of the community itself . It is an open source tool for Qualitative Data Analysis (QDA), which is a way to systematize and understand long chunks of text and to make sense out of it. OpenEthnographer is used for “coding” or tagging the content of online conversations, with awareness of how each tag fits into the social network of interactions.** It is a simple to use and intuitive tool that is key to other and more rich visualizations (ie through the use of Graphryder). Ethnography as always been a solitary science, Open Ethnographer is a new and scalable system that allows digital ethnography at an unprecedented scale, and because the goal of Ethnography is to understand communities make meaning and create culture, from the point of view of the community itself, OE is one of the first step to harness collective intelligence at work. It’s developed for and by ethnographers, but can easily be taught to any community manager to keep track of an online conversation at depth.
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EdgeSense: help you understand how much your community members are active and engaged in the conversation, which is key to understand different roles or project groups that could emerge during the period of activity. It is a dashboard that allows community administrator to understand their community. It’s organized around a graphical representation of the community where nodes represents users and edges represent interactions. EdgeSense helps you take decision on your community management. For example is it possible to highlight or hide the role of moderators, and understand how much the community is self-sustainable or need a push from the center. Another possible analysis is based on the subcommunities that are active in and how dense the networks are between subcommunities. Analysis of nodes then help you understand how much your community members are active and engaged in the conversation, which is key to understand different roles or project groups that could emerge during the period of activity.

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Graphryder: Helps you navigate conversations at scale and gain insight into your community because it maps out a graph of the view of the community about sets of topics, and it can lead to unexpected solutions or original point of views. It is a dashboard tool that allow us to analyze the conversations that are happening in the community through reading of ethnographic data. Graphryder is based on innovative academic research which has led to publication in scientific journals. A dashboard represents conversations, and the fieldnotes made by researchers thereon, in network form. We call these networks semantic social networks, as they incorporate information on social interaction and their meaning. They encode a map of the associations between key concepts as perceived by informants as a group. Graphryder is what helps you navigate conversations at scale and gain insights.

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Publications



You can help.

Get in touch. Edgeryders can support the work of changemakers in more than 80 countries because people like yourself support us with knowledge, contacts and resources.

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This page sits next to Services - but it goes straight into technology: what about community building? even before advanced analytics?

Human powered, care for inclusivity and diversity, focus on lived experiences and what people are doing?

This is also the sensing part - before sense-making, which is software powered.

add it!