Web and Society: A First Look into the Network of Human Service Providers

Human service organizations (HSOs) operate in an environment considered to be prohibitive of collaboration. To understand how HSOs come together to address the grand challenges associated with meeting human needs, we attempted to automatically construct the network of HSOs based on the information publicly available through each organization's website-the medium that people use to find relevant information to access services. Our analysis of the the complex system of relationships among HSOs in Albany, New York suggests that the network of HSOs in this area exhibits a multipolar structure with few super connectors, and strong relations between organizations that serve similar functions. We quantitatively evaluate the quality of the constructed HSOs' network from Web data based on structured, in-person interviews we conducted with HSOs.