Leveraging team formation with social networks: The My Dream Team recommendation system

We introduce My Dream Team (MDT), an interactive web application that uses a recommendation system to help participants assemble teams and learn how social network dynamics influence team formation. The system operationalizes foundational social network principles to illustrate how differences in relational configuration and structural position shape teaming decisions and outcomes. Participants create profiles, report prior relationships, search for potential teammates, and send invitations to form teams. These relationships influence both algorithmic team suggestions and participants’ own choices, allowing participants to observe whether they favor familiar, densely connected contacts or reach across structural boundaries to less embedded contacts. In classroom and workshop activities, MDT serves as a pedagogical tool for exploring how individuals navigate the trade-off between network comfort zones and opportunities afforded by broader, weaker connections. Drawing on more than 30 sessions with over 1,000 participants, we describe how MDT helps participants develop a tangible understanding of network structures and their effects on group composition, information access, and collaborative opportunities. This web application is free, and instructors can configure accounts for their students and participants.