Analyzing collaborative networks emerging in Enterprise 2.0: the Taolin Platform

Coordination and networking among people working in the same organization is not a trivial activity: competences, positions, and the structural characteristics of the company together with communication preferences and group assets may prevent a positive flow of knowledge and decrease opportunities for collaboration. Technologies and, in particular, Web platforms have great potential to serve as a solution to these issues and to promote the spread of innovation and effectiveness inside the work environment. These platforms were usually referred to as Intranets and, more recently, as Enterprise2.0, a new keyword representing how some of the most important characteristics of Web2.0, mainly user participation, can be adopted inside organizations. In this working paper we report the ongoing creation of an open source Enterprise2.0 platform and its deployment inside Fondazione Bruno Kessler (FBK), a research institute with around 400 researchers and employees conducting studies in different research areas. We also investigate the usage and communication patterns in the platform, and analyze the activities of different kinds of users in the platform and their group relations. Our initial investigation reveals that the main social activities, such as chatting and profile viewing, are performed by users more often towards members of their own research group than with other colleagues. When we analyze users according to their seniority level, we find that colleagues who recently joined FBK exhibit larger betweenness centrality both in chat and profile view networks.