Introduction:

The Global Education and Leadership Foundation (tGELF) is an education centric non-profit that intends to curate students who are ‘potential leaders’ and possess ethics, altruism and a bias for action. They expose millions of children to a values-based curriculum, which they developed with the Teachers College at Columbia University. This then allows them to monitor these children and filter from them the potential leaders. There are many points at which these students are filtered, however, the most significant evaluation happens before a students freshman year in college. This evaluation includes everything from psychometric tests to a super-day of interviews, the students who get selected are added to ‘The Leaders Forum’.

Over the last six years, the Leaders Forum has grown to be a diverse community which spans socio-economic stratas and various areas of interest. The idea behind this community is rooted in the need for a value conscious leaders in our society. This forum intends to connect all these ‘potential leaders’ before they take their mantle so that their influential community makes them resilient to the rampant corruption that is widespread in all our systems.

In order for this community to be successful, it also needed to recruit students who were not exposed to the curriculum in school but shared these leadership characteristics with the members within the community. This added a vertical recruitment process, in which, existing members could nominate people from their universities and workplaces to join the Leaders Forum. Which added to the current horizontal year by year recruitment process, which had also increased the number of accepted students drastically.

Challenge:

To maintain the cohesiveness of an exponentially growing community of talented young leaders who don't share common geography, interests or educational institutions.

Until now, this challenge didn't pose a threat to the future of the Leaders Forum because the community was small enough for all the members to know each other personally. However, the number of members has now crossed 217 spanning seven years. Factors like studying abroad and a demanding professional life have prevented the senior members from connecting to the community and the rapidly increase in numbers has also posed a challenge to the structure of the community. 

The success of the community remains contingent on the Leaders Forum being a tightly knit and influential network, however, this is becoming increasingly hard because of limited common ground and time among the members. 

Moreover, tGELF intends to scale the Leaders Forum globally so that the impact can truly be vast. This poses a flood of new questions about how these communities will integrate, coordinate and behave in the future. However, before that problem is addressed, the current Leaders Forum must overcome its growing pains and I intend to use social network analysis as its medicine.

Social Network Analysis (SNA):

I don’t intend to suggest that SNA is the silver bullet that will solve all the issues that the Leaders Forum is facing but I do feel that it can undertake the following tasks:

Provide a snapshot of the current status of the Leaders Forum

1. Understand the subnetworks which could be based on interests, high school, university,etc.
2. Identify the year during which the senior members start to become detached from the incoming members
3. Determine the success of vertical recruiting by analyzing the subnetworks of the members who were accepted into the forum through that process
4. Identify the highly connected individuals and try to rationalize their position in the network
5. Try to find a connection between the ‘networks of the members’ and tGELF community project teams

Use SNA to design a network management strategy which would focus on cohesiveness 

1. Identify the leaders within the community and then connect them with each other
2. Understand the factor which should be used to divide the network into subnetworks
3. Highlight the areas which have very few members and augment recruitment fill those gaps
4. Design activities and initiatives that foster vertical connectivity so that the degrees of separation between two members can be reduced
5. Identify cliques of members who are disconnected and investigate 

Data Collection

The data collection process for this project will be challenging but since the community is still relatively small in number it is an achievable target. There is a lot of attribute data that already exists in the organization as these members went though a compressive evaluation process and  because they provide semi-annual updates.

The initial investigation will contain the following questions:

The Network Question

Attribute Data

• Area of Interest
• Career
• Collaborative Project Involvement
• Recruitment Method

Pre-Existing Attributes

These attributes will have to be manually connected to the data. However, the time needed to do this connection will drastically reduce as all these attributes will be connected to a person’s survey response in one go.

Limitations

Even though the number of members in Leaders Forum are small, it will be very tedious to get the data because:

The community is spread out and no one medium can be used to reach all the members. Every respondent will need to me emailed/contacted on Facebook or given a phone call. 

The network question will contain over 217 people which would make it very hard to get reliable data as a respondent may get tired during the course of this survey.

SNA Methodology

In order to answer the questions listed above an array of tests will need to be undertaken on the dataset. These datasets will need to be dichotomized to include only the members (nodes) that have been communicating frequently. Then a data exploration phase will begin, this phase would include the use of the following measures and tools to provide relevant insight:

Whole Network Measure

Distance: A metric that I consider to be key to the success of this community is the average number of steps for a member (node) to reach any other member (node). This can serve the key whole network measure.

Density: This will be an interesting measure to assist the ‘distance’ metric, however, in an ever expanding network density cannot be used a the key metric because connecting everybody to each other directly may not be realistic or even efficient.

Node Centrality Measures 

Degree: The number of incoming and outgoing connections to a member of the forum can give very interesting insight for potential leadership opportunities and also serves as an indicator of a member’s involvement within the network.

Betweenness: It would be interesting to see who the brokers are within the network because this analysis intends to propose/build a leadership structure and in order to attain that structure the members with high betweenness could play a key role.

Eigenvector: Connections to the most influential nodes is very important as it will be the key factor in making leadership suggestions.

Other Measures

Reciprocity: These ties reflect a much more cohesive network. As the number of members grow, the ties between the older and newer members could become non-reciprocal ties which will dilute the quality of interaction and the network as a whole.

Ego Networks: A basic measure in ego networks can give us very insightful information about the position of that individual within the network. The size, distance, 2 step reach and diameter can be additional measures that are used to judge the future position of a member in the leadership.

Cliques: The primary intention behind this measure is to identify members who are not integrating into the community and to connect members who only interact within their own area of interest to everyone else in the network.

Interesting Hypotheses

• The vertical recruitment process is enhancing selective ego networks
• The vertically recruited members are not integrating within the community
• The horizontal recruitment process is biased towards the high school
• High school cliques are not integrating into the community

Interesting Avenues for Expansion

I would like to work with the following tools and data for this project in the future:

SoNIA: This is software package that is used for visualizing dynamic or longitudinal "network" data. If these survey could be conducted year after year, panel data social network data could be developed. The academic and predictive prowess of which is unimaginable.

Social Networking: A dynamic database integrating email contacts, Facebook and Twitter connections could prove to be invaluable attribute data. This data set could allow any member to reach an unimaginable number of students, professors or professionals who may be linked to anyone in the Leaders Forum Network. It would make for an excellent asset for an organization that intends to create this influential network.