Introduction

Welcome to the Polinode Guide. This guide provides written documentation on the Polinode network analysis platform. You may also find our tutorial videos helpful - they can be found here (opens new window) and contain both quick start guides that will get you up and running in less than 10 minutes as well as more detailed walkthroughs.

If you have a question that is not answered by either this guide or our tutorial videos, please get in touch with us via our support channel. If you click the question mark towards the top right of the screen within the application you will find a support dialogue that you can use to lodge a support ticket or you can simply email us at support@polinode.com. Tutorial videos for the various parts of the application are also available by clicking that question mark icon when in a part of the application that you would like to learn more about. For example, I can navigate to Surveys and then click that icon followed by "Watch Tutorial" and I will be able to watch a tutorial on the Surveys functionality in Polinode.

What is Polinode?

Polinode is a tool for the collection, analysis and visualization of connected data. What do we mean by connected data? Well we mean networks or graphs, that is to say entities that are connected to other entities. Polinode is to networks as Excel is to rows and columns of data.

In Polinode there are multiple modules and, when you login to your account, you will see in the left-hand side menu the names of the modules that you have available to you in your account. In this guide we cover the three primary modules in Polinode - Networks, Surveys and Passive Data. Although these three modules are separate in the application, as you will see below, they are closely related.

Networks

When logging into the application for the first time, if you have this module enabled, you will see a menu item in the left-hand side window labelled "Networks". A network in Polinode is a collection of entities (nodes) and relationships between those entities (edges) and we allow you to upload data to Polinode and then interactively explore and analyze it as a network.

Importantly, since Polinode is a cloud-based platform you can also share these interactive networks with others either publicly or privately. The first major section in this guide walks you through our Networks module and you can jump to it by clicking here.

Surveys

Polinode also provides the ability to collect connected data via relationship-based surveys. If enabled for your account, our Surveys module can be accessed by clicking on the menu item in the left-hand side menu labelled "Surveys". You can think of our Surveys functionality as being like a regular survey but with one very important difference - it allows you to easily ask questions of the respondents about their relationships with other respondents. In fact it's possible to run normal surveys using Polinode but what is really designed for is asking questions like "Who do you go to for advice?" and "Who would you like more access to?". This is what we mean by relationship questions.

There is an important connection between our Networks functionality and our Surveys functionality. Once you've run a relationship-based survey in Polinode you can simply click a button and, for reach relationship question in your survey, an interactive network will be generated and available under Networks. The second major section in this guide walks you through our Surveys functionality, including how to build and run relationship-based surveys. To jump to the Surveys section of this guide click here.

Passive Data

We also provide integrations with a number of passive data sources such as Office 365 and Google Workspace. These integrations make it easy to access the metadata from digitial communication for passive Organizational Network Analysis. This is achieved through our Passive Data module which is only enabled for organizational accounts and generally for a subset of users in those organizational accounts. Most accounts therefore will not see our Passive Data module in the left-hand side menu but, if it is enabled for your account, you will see a menu-item called Passive Data. To jump to the Passive Data section of this guide click here.

Discover

If the module is enabled for you, you will see the "Discover" menu item in the left-hand side window. Clicking on this menu item will open the Discover view which contains a list of publicly available networks (i.e. networks that have been uploaded by other users and set to be publicly available to others). By default you will see handpicked public networks listed. These are networks that we at Polinode think are particularly worth highlighting. You can toggle from these highlighted networks to all publicly available networks by changing the toggle towards the top right of the screen from Handpicked to All.

Any network that you see in this list can be opened up in the explore view by clicking on the card for that network when hovering over it with the mouse. You can also read the description for a network (if there is one) by clicking on the three dots on the network card and then clicking on Show Description. Finally, it's possible to clone or duplicate any public network to your own account by clicking on those three dots and then clicking on Duplicate. When duplicating a public network you can specify a new name for the network and whether you would like the network to be public or private.

Using Polinode for Organizational Network Analysis

Polinode is a highly-flexible and powerful platform that was built for organizational network analysis (ONA). That is to say that it allows a user to understand the informal relationships between people inside of an organization and thereby improve the way that that organization functions. Of course many of our users have used Polinode for use cases that fall outside of what would traditionally be called organizational network analysis and we would encourage you to use Polinode outside of this domain. Still, the core of our user base is focussed on organizational network analysis so we have provided a bit of background on this use case below.

Organizational Network Analysis is traditionally divided up into two types - Passive ONA and Active ONA. Passive ONA refers to using electronic communication data such as email logs to collect information on the connections between people in an organization. Active ONA on the other hand uses direct input from employees in the organization themselves who answer a series of questions about their relationships with other employees.

Polinode can be used for both Passive ONA as well as Active ONA. Using our Networks functionality it is possible to upload any type of connected data to Polinode, including from email logs and other sources. And our Surveys functionality has been specifically built for running the kinds of relationship-based surveys that are required for Active ONA.