Application Background: Female Engagement Teams

• Goal /Aspiration for Project
• Develop a model to:
• Determine whether a community might respond well to an FET
• Enable generalization of engagement strategies
• Permit application of these principles in other contexts
• Approach/Methods/Models
• Approach
• Analyze structure of gendered social networks in Afghanistan
• Model how opinions of international forces evolve in a community and how agents such as FETs can influence those opinions
• Model: bounded confidence opinion dynamics (OD) model of Afghan social networks
• Status, Accomplishments and Next Steps
• Accomplishments: developed and utilized simplified Opinion Dynamics model
• Next Steps:
• Expand the number of topologies investigated
• Introduce more complex structures representing individual opinions and behavior
• Acknowledgements
• Support in foundational work from participants of the International Data Farming Workshop 23/NATO MSG-088 Meeting 5, including Gary Horne and Steven Anderson, and the associated Social Network Analysis group
• Initial modeling efforts aided by Ted Meyer of the Naval Postgraduate School
• Insight into underlying social phenomena provided by Narelle Silwood of the New Zealand Defense Technology Agency