Now here's an interesting challenge. The editorial board of the Journal of Social Structure has announced the first annual symposium on network visualisation. The theme is "Visualisation in the Service of Understanding". The board is challenging network researchers and practitioners to produce a single figure and caption that tells a compelling scientific story in a way that tables or text alone could not. I'm always trying to do this and call the resultant visualizations SOILS . A SOIL is a senior officer interest light, which goes on when they are attracted to a diagram, graph, map or picture. The SOILS Syndrome is a propensity to privilege these visualisations over other forms of knowledge, often at the expense of proper understanding, but I digress.

The editorial board are seeking a single figure (movie, interactive image, etc.) with a caption. The caption should be no more than 350 words and the viewer must be able to understand what is going on from the image and caption alone. They allow another 350 words or so to describe the challenges and techniques to create the visualisation.

I've been reading a good deal about program and portfolio management of late. I even did the United Kingdom Office of Government Commerce's Portfolio, Programme and Project Offices course a week or two ago. This course builds on the PRINCE2 methodology for projects, but I digress. One of the problems I find with portfolio and program management is the lack of simple high level tools to measure the health of the organisation. RAAAKERS™ Profiling, which I'm developing as part of my PhD, may provide a tool.

RAAAKERS™ stands for Responsibility, Authority, Accountability, Awareness, Knowledge, Experience, Resources and Systems and is as a way of representing the main attributes associated with management of a large or complex enterprise. A bottom up approach is applied by collecting data from end users and then aggregating it into a visualisation. I've used it a few times and my colleague Doctor Mark Burnett has also used it with success - see this peer-reviewed article for a description of its use in an organisation. Anyway today I thought I would look at data collected in my PhD and see if the resultant visualisations might be of use. Consider the graph below.