About

Welcome to Social in silico!

What’s the focus of this blog?

Communities, teams or networks are increasingly at the heart of innovative projects where new knowledge is generated. I’m interested in the successful creation, nurturing and shepherding of those teams, primarily within science. Those team-focused activities may variously be called community management, netweaving, team science or in-reach.

Social in silico explores anything related to these topics of collaborative work – both online and off e.g. What does it take to build a successful community? What does a community manager look like? How do we evaluate the success of a collaboration or why we behave the way we do online? Posts might include discussions of findings from the social sciences, psychology, design, and network theory, as well as the occasional book review. It’s a pretty broad scope so if you’re curious about how we work together, leadership development and more then you’ll probably find something of interest!

Where can you start?

• My Considering Community series of occasional posts look at some of the literature and common theories about communities.
• If you’re a community manager or in another social leadership role, you may find Community Manager Musings of interest. In these posts I ponder various aspects of being a community manager – including the skill sets required.
• Looking for some inspiration in your leadership role? Check out the Reading for Leading tips that I share every Monday morning.
• In the past, I’ve created a weekly round-up of links called URLs of wisdom – although these are currently taking a break. These round-ups included articles about online behaviour, social network analysis, science blogging and other academic uses of social media, as well as useful resources for anyone managing online communities.

Of course, you can also browse the categories too! There’s everything from discussions of books to team science.

Who is the author?

A scientist by training, but no longer doing lab research, I’ve almost a decade of experience in community building.  I’ve worked in virtual worlds, with social media and science blog networks and organising offline events with various different formats. I’ve got an insatiable curiosity about human behaviour, a geeky love of online tools, and an enthusiasm to understand what happens where the two intersect. You can find me on Twitter as @LouWoodley or @SocialInSilico.

If you’re looking for a more formal bio, you can find that here.

 

Disclaimer: This is my personal blog. It does not reflect the opinions of my employers – past or present.