This chapter focuses on how four important drivers — awareness, access, engagement, and safety — influence how knowledge travels across informal networks. It describes a research program to determine the means for improving employees' ability to create and share knowledge in important social networks. In the first phase of the research, characteristics of relationships that forty managers relied on for learning and knowledge sharing in important projects were assessed. In the second phase, social network analysis was employed to map these dimensions of relationships among strategically important networks of people in various organizations. Working with a consortium of Fortune 500 companies and government organizations, empirical support for relational characteristics that facilitate knowledge creation and sharing in social networks was developed as well as insight into social and technical interventions to facilitate knowledge flow in these networks.

O ver the past decade, significant restructuring efforts have resulted in organizations with fewer hierarchical levels and more permeable internal and external boundaries. A byproduct of these restructuring efforts is that coordination and work increasingly occur through informal networks of relationships rather than through channels tightly prescribed by formal reporting structures or detailed work processes. For example, informal networks cutting across core work processes or holding together new product development initiatives are not found on formal organizational charts. However, these networks often promote organizational flexibility, innovation, and efficiency as well as quality of products or services by virtue of effeaively pooling unique expertise. Supporting collaboration and work in these informal networks is increasingly important for organizations competing on knowledge and an ability to innovate and adapt.Unfortunately, critical informal networks often compete with and are fragmented by such aspects of organizations as formal structure, work processes, geographic dispersion, human resource practices, leadership style, and culture. This is particularly problematic in knowledge-intensive settings where management is counting on collaboration among employees with different types of expertise. People rely very heavily on their network of relationships to find information and solve problems-one of the most consistent findings in the social science literature is that who you know often has a great deal to do with what you come to know.' Yet both practical experience and scholarly research indicate significant difficulty in getting people with different expertise, backgrounds, and problem-solving styles to effectively integrate their unique perspectives.^ Simply moving boxes on an organizational chart is not sufficient to ensure effective collaboration among high-end knowledge workers.

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Imagers are an increasingly significant source of sensory observations about human activity and the urban environment. ImageScape is a software tool for processing, clustering, and browsing large sets of images. Implemented as a set of web services with an Adobe Flash-based user interface, it supports clustering by both image features and context tags, as well as re-tagging of images in the user interface. Though expected to be useful in many applications, ImageScape was designed as an analysis component of DietSense, a software system under development at UCLA to support (1) the use of mobile devices for automatic multimedia documentation of dietary choices with just-in-time annotation, (2) efficient post facto review of captured media by participants and researchers, and (3) easy authoring and dissemination of the automatic data collection protocols. A pilot study, in which participants ran software that enabled their phones to autonomously capture images of their plates during mealtime, was conducted using an early prototype of the DietSense system, and the resulting image set used in the creation of ImageScape. ImageScape will support two kinds of users within the DietSense application: The participants in dietary studies will have the ability to easily audit their images, while the recipients of the images, health care professionals managing studies and performing analysis, will be able to rapidly browse and annotate large sets of images.