Jurgen A. • Nice idea! How would you do that? (with what kind of data?)
And should we use the members of this group as input?
Or the Big List of Agile/Lean people in Europe that we're creating? (see other post)
(Plenty of well-known people on the Big List are not yet member of this group.)

Sebastian S. • I was thinking about the same thing. Wanna start a github repo and put some code together?

David H. • Jurgen - I was thinking of the big list.

Sebastian - I think all we need (at least to start with) is the data - once we have it in a suitable form, we just need to feed it to Gephi and play with the visualisations. However, we could certainly write some tools to _get_ the data...

We need to do the following

(1) decide on what connections we're interested in. Let's not try to be too clever here: I suggest
(a) twitter followed/following (and I'm assuming given peoples' twitter ids we can use the twitter APIs to get this info, but that we would need to put a script together to get this. Alternatively, someone else may have written something like this already...)
(b) a self assessed ranking of connection - whereby A self-reports on their strength of link to B on some defined scale (e.g. 0: never heard of them -> 5: had an interesting conversation at a conference once -> 10: regular and frequent face-to-face collaboration

(2) go about getting the data. For (a), code/script as necessary, plus peoples' twitter ids. For (b), easiest thing to do would be to send out a spreadsheet to each name. Alternatively we _could_ build an online tool to get the data (this could have the benefit of letting us maintain a dynamic view of connections...)

I'm sure we could get some interesting information out of this.

Oana J. • Love David proposals.
Quick comment about option 1.b.B (if I followed everything well) : it's very good to reflect the feed-back or the image about the people. But who will do the ranking?

In terms of what is the best way push or pull the data,I think we need to answer the question about the priority goals of this build-in network. Gain visibility? have active members? put up new initiatives? And so on..

Hope these couple of thoughts are not out of scope.

Olaf L. • The Twitter ids are there, we collected them together with the emails when we put the list together. The data is in a google sheet...

Yves H. • @David: I love the idea.
about twitter id: then we limit it to people on twitter. I know some very good agile people, who dont' have twitter.
(ok that might be less bad, because thanx to twitter we might find a lot more people then miss on people.)
@Jurgen, there is a limit of maximum 50 list membership on linkedin. I had to remove myself from another list to join this one.

Silvana W. • Like the idea of One Big List. The existence of multitudes of ovelapping groups (without clear differentiators in mission/purpose/topic) IMHO creates more confusion than it serves the cause. (Yves, I too am looking which of my 50 LI groups to drop to make room for others).

Pablo P. • cool. It's beautiful (Gephi demo). Hope it can deliver value. Probably it will.

Jurgen A. • Love the ideas that are going on here.
You might have to wait until the BigList is (somewhat) stabilized.
I'm getting lots of updates to the list, and I am also emailing everyone on the list, because they might know a few more.

Jurgen A. • @Yves: This group already has 431 members. Maybe you can remove yourself from more lists after a few weeks. ;-)

Yves H. • @Jurgen: the number of people that are in a list are not the reason to joinr or leave. It's the interactivity in the group. Or the subject.
If the number was a reason then I have agile lists that are bigger:

Agile In Belgium 635
Agile coaching 1761
Scrum Alliance 4430
Agile project management group 7440
Agile 10114

Jurgen A. • @Yves, don't take my suggestion so seriously. There was a smiley there.

(Besides, growth per week might be more interesting than just size.)

Hannu K. • Hmmm. What is the value of creating this social network graph. Should not we as agile and lean people think about value what we are trying to create first before creating something? Who would be the "user", what would be the goal - what is the user story. Is there something else that would be more valuable. Is this the most valuable thing to do with effort donated to this group. Just thinking...

David H. • Hannu, I've used these techniques in retrospectives and workshops - they're another tool for reflection, a way of working out what's really going on rather than what we think is going on. I don't think it needs to be any more than that - any number of interesting things might follow. If it's not hard to gather this information, I think it would be interesting to see just how interconnected we are as a group.

Martin V. • @David: Just remember that measuring something will have an effect on it. I for one will probably start following the core people on Twitter. :)