Miradi – a Swahili word meaning “project” or “goal” – is a user-friendly program that allows nature conservation practitioners to design, manage, monitor, and learn from their projects to more effectively meet their conservation goals. The program guides users through a series of step-by-step interview wizards, based on the Open Standards for the Practice of Conservation. As practitioners go through these steps, Miradi helps them to define their project scope, and design conceptual models and spatial maps of their project site. The software helps teams to prioritize threats, develop objectives and actions, and select monitoring indicators to assess the effectiveness of their strategies. Miradi also supports the development of workplans, budgets, and other tools to help practitioners implement and manage their project. Users can export Miradi project data to donor reports or, in the future, to a central database to share their information with other practitioners.

AidProject M+E empowers projects to employ good practice & satisfy Donor requirements. Using AidProject M+E is relatively straightforward:

1. Define Lookup Trees & Branches to customise AidProject M+E for your project. These include LogFrame, Methods, Purposes, Gatherers, Monitors, etc.

2. Define Performance Indicators together with their Locations & Periods. Attach additional criteria (your customised Trees & Branches) for reporting & analysis.

3. Maintain Period targets & actual performance data (dates, text, money, yield, etc.).

4. Distribute performance reports to Monitors (Donors, Government, Project Management, Stakeholders, etc.) & export spreadsheets to assist Gatherers.

A licence to use AidProject M+E is absolutely free.

VisuaLyzer is produced by mdlogix, USA. You can download a trial version or buy a copy from this part of their website. For more information contact Allen Tien <allen@mdlogix.com> at mdlogix. If you do contact him, please mention you heard about Visualyser on Rick Davies’s website, MandE NEWS.

My main use of Visualyzer is to draw the organisational networks I am working with, in the course of my work as an M&E consultant on development aid programmes. These are of two types: (a) literal descriptions (maps) of the relationships as known, (b) simplified models of complex networks showing the main types of organisations and the relationships between them. Less frequently, I also import data from Excel to automatically generate network maps. This data usually comes from project documents or online surveys. I also use the combination of UCINET and Netdraw for this task.

Here is an example of a network that I drew by hand directly on screen. It represents the relationships between AMREF’s partners in the Katine project, Uganda. Click on the image to expand it a new window, then click again to get a focused image. You can represent different types of actors by varying the colour, size and shape of nodes. You can represent the different kinds of relationships between them by varying the kind of line used, its colour and thickness. If you click on a node you can enter detailed text or numerical data describing the actor’s attributes, using as many fields as needed. If you click on any link you can enter data about the attributes of that relationships. Both of these sets of data can be exported, on all actors and relationships, as an Excel file.  You can also import the same kind of data, to automatically generate a network diagram.

mdlogix describe it as “an interactive tool for entering, visualizing and analyzing network data. You can create nodes and links directly or import network data from edgelist/edgearray, Excel, or GraphML formats. Once the network is displayed, you can customize visual properties such as the colour, shape, size, and location of nodes and links to create an informative graphic representation. Images of your choice may be used to represent nodes. XY mapping of nodes as a function of node attributes is supported in layered layout. It also provides a number of analysis functions for calculating network and nodal level indices, and for finding sub-groups, partitions, communities, and roles and positions. In addition, VisuaLyzer includes powerful logic programming capabilities that allow you to investigate networks using axioms of classical set theory.”

This all sounds quite complex. But in practice it is the simplest features of Visualyzer which are the most useful. It does have a very good and easy to read Users Guide (5mb), which you may want to look at.

For more on the development of network models / descriptions and their use in monitoring and evaluation go to the Network Models section of this website.

POSTSCRIPT (1st December 2008): See also Overview of Common Social Network Analysis Software Platforms “This report was developed by the Philanthropy and Networks Exploration, a partnership between the Packard Foundation and Monitor Institute. The exploration is an inquiry into how networks can facilitate greater philanthropic effectiveness. For more information, please go to http://www.philanthropyandnetworks.org ”

PS2 (16th January 2009): The link to the “Overview …” doc no longer works. I have now uploaded the doc HERE, after receiving a copy via the Pakard Foundation. They also sent a link to: “Working Wikily: How networks are changing social change“

UCINET & NetDraw ( a combined package)

• Easy to import data from Excel
• Has a huge range of abilities to manipulate and edit the raw data
• Has an online support group (Yahoo Groups)
• There is a detailed how to use it text
• Files can be read by many other software packages
• Not very expensive, and there is a free trial period
• Undergoing continuous development
• Widely used
  
• Not easy to draw network diagrams on screen
• Steep learning curve, many more bells and whistles than you may need
  
• No easy to use introductory texts
• Not easy to edit node and link attribute data on the NetDraw screen
  

Visualyzer

• Perhaps my favorite, beause it is easy to draw and edit networks on screen, which is very useful in workshop settings
• Attributes of nodes and links can be easily edited and displayed
• Can import and export UCINET data
• Very user-friendly manual
• Free trial period
  
• Not cheap
• No online support group
• Does not seem to be undergoing continuous development

yED Graph Editor

• Very good for network drawing
• Many options for layouts
• Can export files to work as web pages
• Nodes can include weblinks, allowing quick access to much more information about each node
  
• Free
• Latest version (3.5) can now open data from Excel worksheets, in matrix, edgelist (relationships)  and nodelist (actors) forms. Including as many attributes for the actors and relationships as needed. It seems it will import both one and two mode  (adjacency and affiliation) matrices. This is a major improvement.
  
• They are working on capacity to export back to Excel, and ability to search actors and relationships by attribute. Both will be very useful
  
• yED is rapidly moving up my list of most favored SNA software packages
  
• Limited analysis capacity

Microsoft NodeXL

• Free, works as a plug-in to Excel 2007
  
• Undergoing continuous development
• Online support group
• All node and link attribute data is visible and easy to edit in Excel sheets, which is great
• Nodes can include weblinks, I think
• There is a useful users guide here
  
• You can’t draw the network direct on the screen,
  • But by using the Excel sheet immediately below the screen you can add nodes and links, and edit their attributes, very easily
• I have had difficulty in importing yEd (GraphML)
  • PS: They report this is being addressed
    
• The layout options (different algorithms) seem quite limited
• I dont yet know as much about it as the other packages above

C-IKNOW

• Iattended a presentation on C-IKNOW at the 2010 INSNA conference and found this package very impressive, for two broad reasons:
  • User-friendliness
  • Sophisticated range of capacities
• This is an online service that is open to use by anyone, free of charge
• Data can be imported, exported and generated by an associated online survey mechanisms
• There are multiple videos showing how different aspects of the package works, along with a detailed downloadable user guide
• Development is ongoing and led by Noshir Contactor, a very smart person, and co-author of Theories of Communication Networks

Discourse Network Analyzer

• “software which combines social network analysis and category-based content analysis. After applying categories to text portions, you can automatically extract two-mode networks or one-mode co-occurrence networks in several file formats. There are also some algorithms for longitudinal analysis.”
• Exports to Excel (in CSV format),  DL files (UCINET), and GraphML files (visone, yEd etc)
  
• Free
  
• Looks useful but I have yet to try it out on my own data
  

Visone

• Patrick Kenis describes this as “very intuitive programme which can be used instantly in consultancy settings”
• Free
• Easy to draw networks live on screen
  
• Continuous development, but not so often as UCINET

Gephi

• New software,
• Open source
• Looks like it could be very good, in time

Inflow

• [Not yet tested, but looks good]

Social Networks Visualizer (SocNetV)

• [Not yet tested, but used by Valdis Krebs]

Cytoscape

• Thomas Delahais says: “I’ve been using consistently Cytoscape, which was designed for neuro-biological analysis but works very well for social sciences! Cytoscape is free, open source and you should complete it with the Max Planck Analyser Plugin, which includes all or most of the usual indicators (diameter, shortest path, etc.) in a unique interface (free for non-commercial use if I remember well). Cytoscape needs some formatting first but then it is very easy to use, very easy to draw on screen too. As a sidenote this is the software I picked when I decided that Ucinet was too complicated for transferring this competency to my colleagues”

B. Lists of software most of which I dont know about, maintained by:

1. KM4DEV list
2. Wikipedia list
3. International Network for Social Network Analysis list
4. Mark Round’s  “SNA Tools and Formats diagram – updated” showing how different software packages are linked by use of the same data formats
   • See also the NetWiki on Data Formats

The number of social network analysis packages is exploding, a bit like the Cambrian explosion of organic life. No software package has yet achieved dominance because of its ability to meet a wide variety of needs.