And responses are not always expert answers or answers at all. But with the Dev list, an initial post might be a question, but it is often a report, or a proposal or just information sharing. We might apply a similar analysis to the support forums. In Q&A forums, where nearly 100% of the initial posts are questions, and responses are all answers, it is interesting to look at the response patterns as an indication of expertise. Some mailing lists have been the topic of research before. It is difficult to ascribe too much meaning to these email response patterns.

The modularity classes, represented by colors here, appear to segment the list participants into what I'll call 'programmers', 'marketing' and 'support', though these labels are imperfect. And in the middle we see additional rich structure of conversation patterns. They typically received one or two response posts, but did not really engage further. The very small circles at the periphery of the graph are those who posted a single question, received a response were never heard of again. The larger circles in the center, connected with many and darker lines, are the core project participants (at least on the development list). With project participants contributing at various levels of engagement. This is not the the 'hub and spokes' or tree pattern of aĬommand/control or hierarchical organization, but a complex organism, On average each person responded to 7.6 other persons, and made 27.1 total responses. Overall the graph has 1077 nodes (persons) and 8181 arcs (response emails). These can represent real-world structures within the community. The colors represent modularity classes, based a calculation that determines the most tightly-connected portions of the overall graph.

The size of each circle is proportionate to the poster's eigenvector centrality, a theoretical measure of influence within the graph. So darker lines portray more frequent communication pathways. The weight of each line is proportionate to the number of times person X responded to person Y. The arcs represent responses to posts, i.e., they are drawn from the person posting to the person to whose post they are replying.

(Click on the image to view a larger version)Įach circle represents a person posting to the mailing list. The above image illustrates the social network of posts and responses to the Apache OpenOffice project's main development mailing list, from when it started in May 2011 until the end of March 2013 when this data was collected.

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