Social network interventions in the space of topological relationships between communities

Abstract

AbstractA social network intervention is a process of intentionally altering a social network to achieve an objective. The objective in question may concern accelerating behaviour change or improving organisational performance. In this work we propose a novel model of social network interventions which considers topological properties of relationships existing between communities. Broadly speaking, topological properties of such relationships include properties described by natural language descriptions such as contains, partial overlap and disjoint. The proposed model provides an abstraction which in many cases is useful for solving problems involving social network interventions. We demonstrate this by simulating interventions on a number of hypothetical and real social networks in the domains of health and security.