#futurespotters network analysis: first stab

[alberto]

The wonderful Marc Smith at NodeXL has kindly provided us with data on the network(s) specified by the use of the #futurespotters hashtag during today’s Twitterstorm. The graph extracted by Marc shows that 258 Twitter accounts were involved, and that a total of 1776 relationships were involved (but 248 were self-loops, so about 1500 really). This includes relationships of three kinds: retweet, reply and follow.

Marc has an interesting analysis here. The bottom line is that he sees 7 main clusters; notice G1 and G3 are predominantly Western European, whereas G2 has most futurespotters in Armenia, Egypt and Georgia (but some Western Europeans too). G4 is mostly unMonastery and Italians, many of them from Matera. G5 seems mostly institutional people grouped around UNDPEurasia; there’s a bunch of “deep greens” around Simone Muffolini in G7. I am not sure who the people in G6 and G8, 9, 10 and 11 are: hello there!

I tried a quick analysis too, but I could only do a very coarse one for boring technical reasons of mismatching data types. Using a different algorithms from Marc (he uses Clauset-Newman-Moore clustering, I Louvain modularity) I find two main subcommunities, one grouped around Edgeryders, noemi_salantiu, artied and arieljrubin; and another one grouped around ladyniasan, alberto_cottica, lasindias, undpeurasia, unmonastery and j32804. @brenoust and I will look further into it and get back to you if we find some cool stuff.

[saidhamideh]

and here’s some analytics from the Twitterstorm Dashboard

The “dashboard” was a kind of digital flyer designed to make it easy for people to follow some instructions and “click to tweet” a few stock tweets intended to spread further awareness of the Twitterstorm. The flyer or “dashboard” was visited 302 times and we can see the’re a good chance that 61 tweets from the storm came directly from the page.

Dashboard users came from all over the world. This was obviously just a small subset of what actually happened in the Twitterstorm.

[inge]

!

It still awesome! I really liked it, it made it more easy for people not necessarily known to edgeryders and its structure to participate in the discussion i think.

[alberto]

Great data. Now what?

Thanks, @saidhamideh, and well done. This is the way I want Edgeryders to operate: try things out, monitor results, then decide whether they are worth it.

We tried the dashboard, we monitored it (well, you did for all of us). What’s your conclusion? Mine is “probably not worth using”: 61 tweets is only about 5% of the action, and setting it up must have cost at least two hours. It’s a very crude indicator, but analysis refinement also has decreasing returns

[saidhamideh]

we also exchanged at least 20 tweets with our community

We sent out around 20 messages on behalf of the community as a part of the “social exchange” feature. They submitted the messages via the form for @edgeryders to tweet out during the day of the storm, and we tweeted them out. These messages can be identifiedy by the “(@username)” used at the end of the tweet.

[noemi]

I thought the dashboard was interesting

Given that we’ve been pushing that only for a couple of days and hours before the actual event, two dozens of supporters tweeting #futurespotters from across the world really helped make it global. Do you think we can get even better results if next time we run the experiment for a whole week @Saidhamideh to not completely overlap with the twitterstorm day and allow us to schedule their messages at peak times? This was quite a learning experience for me. Any chance some of those supporters can actually join us here?

[sammuirhead]

I was also wondering about the day of the week

I’m not sure if Monday is definitely the ideal time for a Twitterstorm - certainly in general terms it might be the best time for tweet visibility, but perhaps not ideal for participation? As people aren’t online as much over the weekend, maybe we miss out on getting people geared up in the two days before - some people may forget that the twitterstorm is happening, or they may not be able to reach out to others in time.

This is based on zero hard evidence though, just a vague feeling.