According to Wikipedia, Community is "a small or large social unit (a group of living things) who have something in common". If we want to analyze any Open Source development community, it's key to understand the relationships of the people that define that community. Open Source communities provide many ways for peers collaboration beyond participation in forums and mailing lists. In any case, people graph or network analysis is one the methodologies used for social interaction analysis. During this talk, I'll show social network analysis with a free, open source software Kibana plug-in integrated in GrimoireLab. I started this project during my degree thesis, 6 months ago, and once it was released everything has changed. People started to download the plugin and contribute to it. Now, the repository hosting the plugin has more than a hundred thousand clones and a hundred of daily visits. The talk will show how to use the Network plugin in order to analyze open source projects. I'm going to show data retrieved from an open source project and I will show that with differents types of networks/graphs.
This Kibana Network plugin has, as the main aim, the integration of visualization systems of social networks in complex systems of visualization and data interaction based on open source. It relies on Kibana as a complex system of data visualization and ElasticSearch as the database. In order to integrate these visualization systems, a Kibana plugin has been developed to visualize this data in a social network way. The plugin is an open source project, uses open source libraries, and it is completly integrated in Kibana (using its components). Hence, it's integrated in GrimoireLab to allow social network analysis in open source development communities. The talk will show how to use, and create graphs with it. I will show how to import open source project data (e.g., commits, usernames, repositories, organizations, etc.) to ElasticSearch form GitHub (or other sources) using GrimoireLab. I will build a graph visualization from scratch, showing its features and usability. You will see how simple it is to create a network that relates users with repositories, organizations, etc. in order to show how a community is related in their own projects. Finally, the talk will explain how a graph/network can be integrated into a dashboard with other visualizations, and how to deal with real time data and filters in order to show what it's happen in the community instantly. Since I started its development, many people contributed, tested and downloaded it. As a consequence, the plugin has evolved and adapted to the community needs. The plugin has had a big impact in the ElasticSearch and Kibana community, and currently it has more than a hundred thousand clones and it receives a hundred of daily visits. Kickstarting and managing this open source project has been a great experience for me, and now I understand more how to contribute, get involved and improve a project in a big open source community. And I hope you can find it useful for your communities too.
Speakers: David Moreno