A million words of care: OpenCare scales up

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In July we migrated the Edgeryders community onto a new, more modern and more usable platform (you are looking at it now). In the aftermath of this move, all API access to the platform had changed. Some of our monitoring tools had to be reconfigured. As a result, we were unable to check on the OpenCare conversation metrics for over two months.

When I could get my scripts to work again, surprise: the conversation had grown considerably. As I write this, it has at 394 unique participants, who authored 4,358 posts in 697 topics. We have cleared the mark of one million words in the conversation.

Where does all this extra content come from? From four main outlets:

  1. The main Opencare conversation continued to grow.
  2. The upcoming Open Village Festival is generating great energy, so lots of interesting content.
  3. We had a stroke of luck: a separate project uncovered lots of interesting projects and experiences from the Southern and Eastern Mediterranean countries. Some of them are about care, so we included them in the OpenCare material.
  4. As part of the transition onto the new platform, we reclassified all the backlog of Edgeryders content. During this, we unearthed some content that is relevant to OpenCare, and included that too.

The different origins of all this content shows in the slightly more modular structure of the resulting network: it looks less like a hairball, and you can see groups of participants clustering around single nodes like @ezio_manzini (southwest), @matteo (northeast) and @hexayurt (northwest). Despite this, the conversation still induces a highly cohesive social network – I guess it is a testament to the cohesiveness of Edgeryders in general. The network has 1,405 unique edges, and is completely connected into a single giant component that connects 100% of the nodes. A small number of moderators and community managers engages absolutely everyone, but even removing them from the network leaves well over 80% of the nodes connected to the giant component (this is the network shown in the picture above). I am looking forward to the full analysis in due time.