![\"Word](\"https:\/\/2d823b65bb.nxcli.io\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/12\/2013-aoo-cloud.png\")
<\/a><\/p>\nI thought it would also be interesting to look at this from a social network perspective, looking at the atomic units of collaboration on a mailing list:\u00a0 responding to a post.\u00a0 Of course, not all posts involve a response.\u00a0 It is common for someone to post information, not requiring or expecting a response.\u00a0\u00a0 But there are many responses.\u00a0 As mentioned above, there were 24,423 posts in 4,819 threads, so an average of 4 responses per post.\u00a0 We can represent this as a directed graph, with each poster treated as a node, and a directed arc to each responder node from the node of the original post author.\u00a0 (This might seem backwards, and you could argue for reversing the arcs, but in general in mailing lists the responder is providing value to the original poster, so the centrality\u00a0 of the responder will be more relevant.\u00a0 Consider, for example, the questions coming from random users, and the experienced project members who answer them.)<\/p>\n
Forming a graph in this way gives us a giant component<\/a> (representing 98.84% of the whole graph) with 1,955 nodes and 7,069 arcs.\u00a0\u00a0 Average degree (number of collaboration partners for each person) is 3.6.\u00a0 46 people responded to more than 50 other people.\u00a0 Maximum degree is 714 (Apache OpenOffice V.P. Andrea Pescetti).\u00a0 A visualization of this graph, using the open source Gephi<\/a>) follows.\u00a0 You can click on the image for a larger version.\u00a0 Nodes have been scaled to reflect betweenness centrality (a measure the degree to which a node helps connect others into the graph) and colored via a modularity algorithm which finds sets of nodes that have a high degree of interconnection.<\/p>\n You should click on the graph to see the full-size version.<\/p>\n What a marvelous, large and complex project we have in Apache OpenOffice!<\/p>\n