Methodology

Method

Open And Data Driven

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

Collective intelligent 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 Network. 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.