Identifying Social Roles in Software Developing Communities

Description

In software developing communities, a variety of management, operational and advisory tasks have to be performed. Depending on the organizational structure, these tasks are more or less strictly defined. On a second level, the members of these communities also exhibit other, rather social, roles in their every day working life. Part of their behavior is recorded by online communication platforms, like R-Forge (http://r-forge.r-project.org), an integrative framework for R (R
Development Core Team, 2008) developers. In order to find social roles in the R developers' communities, we introduce a procedure based on closeness centrality
(Freeman, 1979) and edge-weighted closeness (Bohn et al., 2008). For this purpose, closeness is understood as a centrality measure where every network member collects a certain amount of centrality in his or her nth-order neighborhood (distance). The
neighborhoods where nodes gain most of their closeness tell a lot about their social roles and the network structure as a whole. We will also show that this methodology finds global as well as local centers and is therefore suitable for larger networks.

Period	13 Mar 2009 → 16 Mar 2009
Event title	International Federation of Classification Societies (IFCS) 2009 Conference
Event type	Unknown
Degree of Recognition	International