
StackOverflow and Github Visualized As Cities - hermanschaaf
http:&#x2F;&#x2F;ekisto.sq.ro&#x2F;<p>Ekisto is an interactive network visualization of three online communities: StackOverflow, Github and Friendfeed. A graph layout algorithm arranges users in 2D space based on their similarity. Cosine similarity is computed based on the users&#x27; network (Friendfeed), collaborate, watch, fork and follow relationships (Github), or based on the tags of posts contributed by users (StackOverflow). The height of each user represents the normalized value of the user&#x27;s Pagerank (Github, Friendfeed) or their reputation points (StackOverflow).<p>Sharing this because I thought it&#x27;s really awesome - published Dec 1 by Alex Dragulescu.
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steveklabnik
Don't abuse the text field in the submission form to add commentary to links.
The text field is for starting discussions. If you're submitting a link, put
it in the url field. If you want to add initial commentary on the link, write
a blog post about it and submit that instead.

[http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

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maaaats
I wouldn't say it's "abusing", as the page is probably less visited when one
has to copy the url and not just click a link.

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acadien
So many white men. (just an observation, not commentary)

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shangxiao
White male shaming: Now moving on to grander things like selfless community
pursuits such as contributing to open source (just an observation, not
commentary)

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ludwik
I'm a white male, very active on Stack Overflow, and working to become more
active on Github. Still, I find acadien's observation very interesting. We
should aim at trying to find the real causes of the situation, instead of
being offended, just because someone pointed out something that clearly is a
fact.

Suggesting that white males are more selfless is a bullshit answer. Maybe they
(we) are the only ones who have the right combination of being educated and
having enough free time? Maybe this has something to do with gender
stereotypes? Or gender roles and woman usually having much more additional non
work related responsibilities? I don't know. But it's worth asking.

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bennyg
It may be worth asking why, but I don't think it's an actual problem, and
especially not a problem that needs action to make the distribution of
races/genders more fair. White men aren't preventing people from getting into
open source software. Just the opposite actually - a few white men have made
it extremely easy for people to get into OSS.

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jonathanmarvens
Being a 19-year-old black software engineer, from a "current reality" POV, I
can say that acadien's observation is definitely spot-on. However, I can also
say that it seems things are getting much much better. Just a little under 3
years ago, I'd attend a conference with 300, 500, or even 500+ attendees, and
would EASILY count the amount of black folks on a pair of hands (yes) and the
ladies on 2-3 pair of hands. This isn't necessarily the case anymore (it's
still kind of a problem though). Also, a majority of the "white men"
programmers I know in the industry are very welcoming and helpful in this
sense, so I wouldn't blame "white men" since that's just too general, and
quite frankly, wrong, for the most part. Now that that's out of the way, THERE
ARE those "white men" who are not so welcoming and aren't afraid to show it
either. I couldn't even tell you the amount of times I've been offended by
such folks. There's even one conference I went to where I was literally
stopped on my way to grab lunch and randomly requested to go to security to be
searched while EVERYONE ELSE was enjoying the sessions and meals. I was
searched, I went to bathroom and cried for a while (yes, I admit it), and
immediately headed home afterwards. Which conference ... well, I digress. The
point I'm trying to make here is that we shouldn't be blaming folks in a
general sense, but instead find those folks who do have such behavior and try
to help them change.

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rmchugh
great post. i think the main cause is economic / structural, but the
underlying problem may well be exacerbated by bad behaviour of individuals.
code4lib have an anti-harassment problem to deal with the behavioural problems
([https://github.com/code4lib/antiharassment-
policy](https://github.com/code4lib/antiharassment-policy)) I've never been to
their conferences so couldn't say how helpful it has been for them. as for
dealing with the structural issues, that's a bigger problem without any clear
answers that I'm aware of.

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tectonic
Clickable: [http://ekisto.sq.ro/](http://ekisto.sq.ro/)

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Danieru
In case someone else wants to find github user ids, you can use this webapp:
[http://caius.github.io/github_id/](http://caius.github.io/github_id/)

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dragulesq
For Github you have to enter the username. For Stackoverflow you have to enter
the numerical userid which can be found in the url of your profile page.

The Github API rate limiting made it impossible to keep up with the
user/repository growth so I stopped in March 2012. Only users that were public
at the date of the crawl, and are part of the largest connected component of
the network will be shown.

I am the designer of Ekisto. Questions and feedback are welcome :)

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contingencies
Hey! Firstly, good to see some Romanian software news that's not linked to
organized crime. I love your country! I was lucky enough to cycle around it
for a month a few years ago and really loved the place.

Random suggestion: mapping a user metric such as dominant programming language
to inform the building style. So maybe shell code would be more oldschool
(Chinese/Japanese/Korean style wooden pagoda type look), perl would be hacky
(like lashings of bamboo), enterprisey languages would be shiny skyscraper
windows, and obscure stuff would be mud brick or straw bale or something!

The spatial proximity domain seems a little wasted with this mapping ..
perhaps it could be improved by using direct links informed by real
clones/contributions.

I hope Github gives you a data feed!

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dragulesq
For my thesis I had some similar ideas, but they were more abstract,
sculpture-like. The user volume was a cylinder, with varying radii (mapped to
activity) at different heights (time). The mappings you are talking about are
very subjective, but it's good brainstorming. Refining and iterating over such
ideas, brings innovation.

You are spot on that Github has very rich relationships of collaboration and
sharing that are not all expressed by the data I chose. I wrote a longer post
about my goals and motivation with Ekisto that addresses that concern:
[http://processq.tumblr.com/post/69098066993/ekisto-
design](http://processq.tumblr.com/post/69098066993/ekisto-design)

I also write about future work which will improve the current version. I think
some tagging functionality either precomputed or user-contributed will help a
lot of newcomers understand the map better. Stackoverflow veterans immediately
recognize the clusters and the avatars.

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fpp
Thanks for the overview on the algorithms / approach used on your Tumblr -
looking forward to your post on the visualization pipeline

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kken
The is really cool. But what exactly am I looking it? Would be awesome if this
was clickable somehow to see the projects/account linked to it.

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personjerry
On the left hand side there is a (Q)uery tool. Click it, and then you can
click on any stack to find out who it is.

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dragulesq
There is a shortcut: Press Q + click. Pressing Q turns on query mode for one
click. I only included it that in the mouseover tooltips, fearing abuse. The
server seems to handle it well, so query away.

The info overlays are also draggable, so one can make sense of their
surroundings. See how this user mapped "his village":
[https://twitter.com/mc_sabourin/status/409592532452913152](https://twitter.com/mc_sabourin/status/409592532452913152)

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SteroidsLove
This is really cool but makes my eyes feel funny. Something with the frame
rate, feels as if the screen is shaking. But nevertheless amazing :)

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jsmeaton
I felt the same way - I think it's partially frame rate, but also scrolling on
a 2d plane in a "3d" world.

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dragulesq
Also the tiling effect might have something to do with it. There are multiple
levels of zoom that get loaded and scaled as you zoom in.

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agumonkey
Github's top 20 of 2012 only includes two humans, woops watir is a group, so
here it is, only defunkt.

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richo
Would really love to see this with up to date data.

Edit: Just saw the author explain why that won't happen.

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mcmire
This is really, really cool. Never seen this before. Nicely done!

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lukasm
I'm under Jon Skeet's toe

