Will Glass-Husain wrote: > Replying to the community list as requested...
Thank you. > Neat app! Not immediately intuitive as to how to interpret it, but with a > little experimentation I could see patterns. For example, it was > interesting to notice how my email moved from the outskirts of the circle > with data from early months to the center of the circle in later months > (for > the projects I'm involved with). > > I'm still unclear on what to look for in terms of community "health". eheh, I'm not sure either :-) > What are some of the general macro patterns you've seen with this tool? First of all, the 'size' of the pruned graph is generally a good sign because it means there is less chance of a few key players moving out of the project and leaving the social network disconnected. Another interesting thing is that the people at the center are actually the people I expect to be there. In projects that I follow, I was hardly ever surprised: the distance of their node from the 'center of social gravity' of the community was always (and I mean *always*) reasonable. I don't know about the projects that I don't follow, but I've never heard anybody complain. I also found out to be very effective in understanding how much "traction/influence" a person might have in a community by dragging his node. Sometimes, if more people are involved in a discussion, I pull their nodes apart and see where the center of gravity shifts. Normally the result of the discussion tends to settle toward the person that moved more the graph. This is amazing, because agora does *NOT* even try to understand what the messages say, but only that the message did happen. I suspect there is a deep reason for the apparent incredible signal: in well behaving communities, people do not reply if they don't have anything to say. I suspect Agora would fail miserably to be as effective in disfunctional communities where people keep emailing eachother with flamewars. Luckily, this is rarely the case in the foundation. > What insight does this provide into the community? The docs provide a good > micro > level description of how the app models the relationships between > individuals, but don't discuss the macro patterns that emerge. It'd be > interesting to hear some of your thoughts. I wrote this years ago, as an experiment. Then I started to use it more and more as a 'telescope' to look at communities that I didn't know, to understand who were the key players in that communities or, if I heard something worrysome about somebody, whether or not to worry that it could have a big impact on a particular community. Unfortunately, this came before the incubator was setup, so the mail archive on nagoya, who was based on eyebrowse, was kinda left alone and a lot of the mailing lists were not there. Some people from the incubator wanted to evaluate the growth of the project with Agora, but they couldn't. There seems to be a lot of information in there. I have my own way of using it but I don't know if it's a general rule and I don't want people to think that their project is "better" than another just because their graph is bigger or more densly connected. But it is fascinating to compare different mailing lists, especially over time. For example, whether or not 'dev' is more or less densily connected than 'users'. And it's also very useful to understand the 'bridges', the people that write email in more than one mailing list, those are very important people for the ASF, as they bring crosspollination and allow information to flow thru the various islands (and improves our ability to evolutionarely adapt to change in the technical and social ecosystem). It's a social telescope. And normally it's a lot of fun to use telescopes, even if you don't understand everything about the why the stars and galaxies are they way they are. I feel the same way about Agora: you don't have to have a model of what is happening absolutely, as long as you can spot differences between various projects. But I don't know the metric for community health and I don't think such a thing even exists, so if that's what you are looking for, you are not going to get it from Agora (nor anything I do). -- Stefano. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
