On it today!
Ok guys, glad we agree on this. So the opt out option should be framed as “we are doing this already, incorporating info that is visible anyway on other platform contributions of yours, but you can always un-tick the boxes if you so prefer, especially after the report comes out at the end of July”
The age groups will be hard to fill, we have scarce info in that respect.
Inga I’m sending you a list with all STF contributors and their user profiles…
updated
just updated my profile to make it based in Cairo .
@Inga if u need help with data entry am on it .
@Noemi, I have received everything. However, I accidentally left my charger while travelling and will be without my computer for a day or so… 
Done already!
Hey, no problem I went through the list and updated the users’ countries… over 130, so basically anyone who contributed at least a comment. Double check maybe to make sure we got everyone?
Looking forward to the published draft, let me know if you need help with anything…
Checking while processing
Hi @Noemi, @Inga!
I’m preparing views (and geoviews) with the User’s “based in” information, but I still find some missing and unprecise information for many users. Examples can be empty, “Universe”, “Europe” etc. The data is unstructured, so sometimes I have a city, sometimes, I have just a country, sometimes both, or even 2 or 3 cities 
I’m trying to rebuild it on my own, but I’m wondering if I am using the right field in the end: @Matthias I haven’t found any other field in the User table that could correspond to the country information (the view I’m editing is stf_network_data_users).
For the age group information, it may be alright now, although 40 people (of ~130) haven’t filled it yet, we can see most users belong to the 26-30, then 21-25, and inter-class exchanges do not dominate the discussions (which is good: the age gap is not relevant in Spot The Future).
Alright
Done by hand, the data is now sort of cleaned
So here is a bunch of “world” views of the STF community (the original files have higher resolutions) choose the ones you prefer the most.
In these views the links present interactions across members of the countries, the size of nodes (not really visible in the 3D views) count the number of country members of STF.
I put a few different foci on the map for the idea
Here is also the pattern of country interactions, we can easily notice the central place of Georgia, Armenia and Egypt.
Here is a more subtil representation, it’s actually color coding STF member from their country of origin, however there are too many countries to keep color as a relevant variable, so in the first view, a link is colored from the nodes it connects (color interpolation for those who know Tulip). In the second view, I have colored in RED intra-country interactions and in BLUE inter-country interactions.
Here you get the details by countries/pairs of countries
So finally, we can see that the STF community is widely spread around the world, and is focused around 3 communities which are Armenia, Georgia and Egypt.
Most interactions occur between members of these communities, especially within the Egyptian community, but interestingly in this data Romania shows a strong mediator/intermediary role within all discussions
Thanks Benjamin!
The world views representations look beautiful!
Indeed Romania is a little bit overrepresented because of well, just me.
What I like to see is that the number of inter-country interactions seems to be consistently higher than the intra-country interactions (the blue vs red representation)- a result of our collaboration oriented design. Can we get a view of that and numbers for just the 3 countries (Ge, Ar, Egypt)?
As for the age data, indeed a minority of people filled that field in their user profiles, but unfortunately there’s nothing we can add there manually 
Good job!
Noemi, Romania being overrepresented is a good thing, it means you are doing a great job 
“As for the age data, indeed a minority of people filled that field in their user profiles, but unfortunately there’s nothing we can add there manually :-(”
But I thought that was the idea, adding things manually? You think that’s not possible because we can easily put in the wrong data for people who are at the edge between age groups maybe? In that case I could modify the age group field to have an “age group” value centered around each year, so like: 20–24, 21–25, 22–26 and so on. Would that help? Would that be acceptable for analysis, @#5924 (awesome visualizations, btw)?
We don’t know how old everyone is
that’s why we can’t manually add it.
Guesswork
But we could make a guess … for evaluation, it is enough if we guess the age group right, and we could even increase age group span to 7 years, or even better, increasing span widths for older people. If we make such guesses however, that kind of information should not be publicly on the profile page, since, you’re right, it might be plain wrong. A hidden field then.
The golden fleece…
…for data analysis would be the exact age of course.
The smaller the size of the span the better. What you were proposing is centering around the distributions, but it would assume that the community wouldn’t evolve, even within a long time (what would happen to the edge ryders and future spotters in 3 or 5 years? and let’s be crazy in 20-30 years?).
It’s good that we have all these privacy barriers because the techniques we use to understand our community are the same used by agressive commercial companies, I would suggest this information to be pure private data, and ask the users to give us the right to use it for analysis. Even if we have only 80% of the data, I still can say is that 80% of the EdgeRyders STF community is mostly represented by young people between 21 and 30 y.o.
Then let’s skip age analysis here (privacy issues).
To not get into troubled legal waters, we can not add precise age information without user consent (since that is personal data, in the sense that it enabled to identify somebody if taken together with other data). We could add age group information though, but as Benjamin notes, this is not too useful for analysis.
So I guess we have to skip age analysis for this project. It is unrealistic to expect users entering age information after the project is mostly over. What we have to do in the next project is asking for that kind of data right when a user registers (and also explaining what data is only for research, and what will be shown in the profile).
Maybe inform users
what actual questions we are intending to ask ER data with these type of specific information, e.g. “by giving us this information, you will help us understand how people from different cities interact together, how people across different generation interact together (are youngsters and elders talking about gardening or about web designing?)”
This may just help people trusting us better, and willing to collaborate more.
Definitely
Ok so no more interference for now with user profile info. I agree with both of you, asking for this data in the beginning will ease the work, plus it will give us time to collect it when some users will simply skip it.
hahaha yeah
Hahaha, I could confirm that was you, but in this study I didn’t want to spot individuals, but more highlight the overall cooperations. However it really confirms that you are doing an amazing job at managing the community! (As just said @matthias, I’ve read your comment ;))
It’s not that true because Egypt has a very high amount of within countries interactions (about 60), here you have the detailed figures STF - Member interactions.xlsx
I’ve been tracking most of missing users through their facebook, linkedIn or twitter accounts, so I guess we could decrease the number of missing age entry, but it wouldn’t be worth the effort.
Mindblowing
Ben, I am speechless. What did you use? Does Tulip do all this starting from the JSONs? Can I ask you to write a few lines about the software stack that generated this stuff?
Python
with Tulip does part of the job but yes it starts from python to extract the country, and actually Tulip makes it fairly easy to geotag with the geographic view… when it does not crash. This is still quite experimental, and the google map view doesn’t work at all for example.
Tulip has the globe and geomaps embedded, and can help you retrieve latitude and longitude of position from google maps (on a string property). So I could make something even more awesome if I could properly extract city names, but it then becomes quite cumbersome.
In the final report, I will add the lines about Tulip and the different components I’ve used.
By the way, where is the exact wiki for the final report? I think I have put too much notifications from EdgeRyders and I am often retrieving some of them in my spam box.
Make your own
I suggest you make your own wiki for the network stuff. @Inga should upload one, I think, tomorrow, but there is no reason to merge them together.
Ah alright
Thanks guys, I thought it was a big overall thing!
I have uploaded wiki yesterday
but in a separate post: