{"id":2163,"date":"2013-05-06T10:59:53","date_gmt":"2013-05-06T14:59:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/2d823b65bb.nxcli.io\/?p=2163"},"modified":"2013-05-06T10:59:53","modified_gmt":"2013-05-06T14:59:53","slug":"mapping-the-asf-part-ii","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.robweir.com\/blog\/2013\/05\/mapping-the-asf-part-ii.html","title":{"rendered":"Mapping the ASF, Part II"},"content":{"rendered":"

In my last post I showed you one view of the Apache Software Foundation, the relationship of projects as revealed by the overlapping membership of their Project Management Committees<\/a>.\u00a0 After I did that post it struck me that I could, with a very small modifications to my script, look at the connections at the individual level instead of at the committee level.\u00a0 Initially I attempted this with all Committers in the ASF\u00a0\u00a0 This resulted in a graph with over 3000 nodes and over 2.6 million edges.\u00a0\u00a0 I’m still working on making sense of that graph.\u00a0 It was very dense and visualizing it as anything other than a giant blob has proven challenging.\u00a0 So I scaled back the problem slightly and decided to look at the relationship between individual members of the many PMCs, a smaller graph with only 1577 nodes and 22,399 edges.<\/p>\n

Here’s what I got:<\/p>\n

\"\"
\nAs before I excluded the Apache Incubator, Labs and Attic, but looked at all other PMC members.\u00a0 Each PMC member is a dot in this graph, with a line connecting two people who serve together on a PMC.\u00a0 The layout and colors emphasizes communities of strong interconnection.\u00a0 An SVG version of the graph is here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Each PMC is a “clique”, a group that strongly interacts with itself.\u00a0 But aside from a small number of exceptions, which you can see at the top of the graph, each PMC has one or more members who are also members of other PMCs. \u00a0\u00a0 In structural terms they are “between” the two communities and help connect them.\u00a0 This could mean various things in social terms, from acting as a conduit of information, a broker, or even a gatekeeper.\u00a0 The person who introduces you to new people at a party serves the same role as the person who tells the prisoner stories of the outside world.\u00a0 The context is different, of course, but in either case, the structural position is one of importance.<\/p>\n

A common way of quantifying the importance of the nodes that connect other nodes, is via a metric called “betweenness centrality<\/a>“, which you can think of as a measure of how many shortest paths between other nodes pass through that node.\u00a0 If the shortest path is always going through you, then you have high betweenness and you’re helping connecting the disparate parts of the organization.<\/p>\n

Let’s draw the graph again and show each node with a size proportionate to its betweenness.\u00a0 You can see more clearly now the position of the high betweenness nodes and how they bridge sub-communities.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Now of course, the structural role doesn’t necessarily<\/em> equate to the actual social role.\u00a0 Someone could be inactive or lurking in multiple projects and not serve as the conduit of much of anything, though on paper they appear central. \u00a0 But Apache participants might take a look at this larger version of the chart<\/a>, where I have labeled the nodes, and see how well it matches reality in many ways.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In my last post I showed you one view of the Apache Software Foundation, the relationship of projects as revealed by the overlapping membership of their Project Management Committees.\u00a0 After I did that post it struck me that I could, with a very small modifications to my script, look at the connections at the individual […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[211,213],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-2163","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-apache","7":"category-social-network-analysis","8":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robweir.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2163","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robweir.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robweir.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robweir.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robweir.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2163"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.robweir.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2163\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2167,"href":"https:\/\/www.robweir.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2163\/revisions\/2167"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robweir.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2163"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robweir.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2163"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robweir.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2163"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}