Rhythm: A Unified Measurement Platform for Human Organizations

© 2018 IEEE. To understand and manage complex organizations, we must develop tools capable of measuring human social interaction accurately and uniformly. Current technologies that measure face-to-face communication do not measure interaction in a unified manner and often ignore remote interaction,...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Lederman, Oren, Mohan, Akshay, Calacci, Dan, Pentland, Alex Sandy
Other Authors: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Media Laboratory
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) 2021
Online Access:https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/134977
Description
Summary:© 2018 IEEE. To understand and manage complex organizations, we must develop tools capable of measuring human social interaction accurately and uniformly. Current technologies that measure face-to-face communication do not measure interaction in a unified manner and often ignore remote interaction, an increasingly common communication modality. In this article we present Rhythm, a platform that combines wearable electronic badges and online applications to capture team-level and network-level interaction patterns in organizations. The platform measures conversation time, turn-taking behavior, and the physical proximity of both co-located and distributed members. Our goal is to empower organizations and researchers to measure formal and informal social interaction across teams, divisions, and locations. We describe two pilot studies that use this platform and discuss how measurement systems like Rhythm may further the fields of computational social science and organizational design.