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As someone who works in graph visualization, this looks like just another case of a default hairball visualization (those often arise when combining force-direc

by ygra 7y ago

As someone who works in graph visualization, this looks like just another case of a default hairball visualization (those often arise when combining force-directed layout with dense graphs): beautiful pictures (in the sense of nice to hang it on the wall), but rather useless as a visualization. Looking at the various hairballs it would be more helpful to render simple HTML lists ordered by some graph analysis algorithm results (centralities, etc.) What you “see” in these diagrams is mostly a listing of nodes sorted by degree (and you can't even tell the exact degree). Also, nearness often indicates relationships that simply aren't there. It might be better to find a set of use-cases that describe how users of the app find answers to real-world questions they have, and then add interaction to the diagram that helps the users in answering these questions. Right now, basically the only answers it provides: who had the highest number of interactions. And for many cases, you can't even read the names of those that the people interacted with because labels there are dozens of overlapping labels.

n16e 7y ago
The overview of a bigger repository looks kinda like a hairball, but the ui lets dig deeper, and filter the graph by "code areas" (paths) or organizations. I was thinking about a few use cases like these that come first to my mind: - for open source - assessing if a framework (repo) might have a bus factor problem. Take Vue https://bit.ly/2nVxsh5 https://bit.ly/2nVxsh5 and React https://bit.ly/31njWR3 https://bit.ly/31njWR3 . It is easy to see that if Evan for any reason drops Vue then it might be a problem - I imagine a bus factor is even a bigger problem also for closed source projects - for developers - quickly finding experts in a some area of the project (especially a bigger one with few 100s developers). The ones more connected are also more likely to answer your questions - eventually they are well connected for a reason. - for community managers - well each open source project is a community and this is its visualization - so yeah you usually know the top contributors in the community but there might be more people that you might try to involve and engage more in the project. The tool lets you browse the connections in the repository and gives you more social context. - for non-technical managers / hr - well... they have hard time browsing github as it's full of code (of course it is). This gives them another perspective and insight how works get done within a project (open or close sorce). Though I am not super sure if showing a network is more friendly than showing a code, but that is a common way of showing social structures in sociology for instance - so yeah humanities area. But maybe showing last 30 days of collaboration would untangle the hairball and give more actual info - this is something I working on now - and your comment tells that this might be important. Thank you for your feedback. If you have some thoughts on the use cases I wrote or others please share. Thank you!

by ygra 7y ago

n16e 7y ago

The overview of a bigger repository looks kinda like a hairball, but the ui lets dig deeper, and filter the graph by "code areas" (paths) or organizations. I was thinking about a few use cases like these that come first to my mind: - for open source - assessing if a framework (repo) might have a bus factor problem. Take Vue https://bit.ly/2nVxsh5 https://bit.ly/2nVxsh5 and React https://bit.ly/31njWR3 https://bit.ly/31njWR3 . It is easy to see that if Evan for any reason drops Vue then it might be a problem - I imagine a bus factor is even a bigger problem also for closed source projects - for developers - quickly finding experts in a some area of the project (especially a bigger one with few 100s developers). The ones more connected are also more likely to answer your questions - eventually they are well connected for a reason. - for community managers - well each open source project is a community and this is its visualization - so yeah you usually know the top contributors in the community but there might be more people that you might try to involve and engage more in the project. The tool lets you browse the connections in the repository and gives you more social context. - for non-technical managers / hr - well... they have hard time browsing github as it's full of code (of course it is). This gives them another perspective and insight how works get done within a project (open or close sorce). Though I am not super sure if showing a network is more friendly than showing a code, but that is a common way of showing social structures in sociology for instance - so yeah humanities area. But maybe showing last 30 days of collaboration would untangle the hairball and give more actual info - this is something I working on now - and your comment tells that this might be important. Thank you for your feedback. If you have some thoughts on the use cases I wrote or others please share. Thank you!