Commetrix - Knowledge Community Metrics and Visualization

> Collaboration and Software Installation
How can YOU EMPLOY Commetrix? We want to engage in network oriented Systems Analysis in communication and collaboration contexts, e.g. in a corporate application, in a research setting, and in the furture even in a personal end-user context. However, due to time constraints and recent requests we decided to start with corporate and academic collaborations. Click here, if you are a researcher, interested in using Commetrix and in collaborating in an international user community we plan to develop around the software framework. Click here, if you want to support your corporation with the software framework and want to learn more about possible application scenarios. Click here, if you are a private person and you want to learn more about how the Framework can be beneficial for your personal context. However, although the underlying functionality is provided by the tool, eliciting value by understanding connections between a multitude of networked people is not easily done. It can require the development of individual connectors to access existing data sources or the adaptation of the tool to meet your individual reporting and analysis needs - tailoring the tool to your special application area (see above). This is why in most scenarios we suggest a cooperation in a project form. .. CORPORATE APPLICATION Corporate application objectives can be: understanding your customer communities understanding your employee communities showing the communication/collaboration patterns in cross-organizational collaborations eliciting the core structures in massive electronic communication networks providing ego-centred 'ego-networks' for busy people with diverse contacts visualizing and measuring the agility and the speed of a network monitoring the evolvement and growth of customer communities trace special events and their effect on the communication behaviour elicit a topic and expert map from past electronic communication identifying clusters of your community working on topics and many more, as you will probably tell us. I Corporate Users. Commetrix software tools can be licensed, and consulting on the method and the software (usually connected to a initial collaboration project for adapting the software to a use case) is possible. You can contact it via the e-mail adress below to initiate a discussion of your demand and to identify possible solutions based on the Commetrix framework. To give you a feeling for what could be done and how, please read this little generic overview about collaboration projects. for corporate users, generally two methods of tool-supported network analysis apply: Single channel analysis and multiple channel analysis. The latter includes the integration of various communication channel to derive the whole picture of the invisible networks and pathways in the origanization. Ia Corporate Single channel analysis project: We seek project partners, who are interested in discovering and analyzing their corporate communication networks. This can elicit groups of experts engaged in furthering various corporate issues or simply give insights about existing communities to elicit their active and inactive parts. Object of analysis can be the e-mail network, a discussion group, instant messaging, or even VoIP usage. The project could also be targeted at understanding and analyzing customer communities. Dynamic analysis can show the parts with largest growth or decline or alert when sudden changes and dynamics occur. If you are interested in this option, please send an e-mail to info@trilexis.com. (also see CORE below) Ib Corporate Multiple channel analysis project: This project proposal will tap the full potential of visualizing virtual communication and collaboration. We seek a project partner to identify and elicit various channels of communication and collaboration, including joint meetings of people, joint document authorship, joint team actions, and of course communication traces. This will allow to create a picture of the real work patterns in a corporation. As multichannel analysis is still in its research stage, we currently linvite project partners, who are willing to cooperate in this research on a self-cost-base, i.e. by funding the costs of this exploratory venture. This will primarily include the costs of capturing requirements and data plus the costs of developing the necessary integration transformations. If you are interested in this option, please send an e-mail to info[at]commetrix[dot]net Project approach. We suggest the following project proceddure (see figure below). After defining your project's objectives and selecting your communication channels (E1) , we will check the availability of those channels for analysis. The next step (E2) can be necessary to develop the required connectors to capture data from the selected data sources, i.e. communication channels. Further, according to the project objectives, it can be required to develop extended analysis and visualization functionality to meet your personal monitoring needs (alerting functions, special coloring methods, reporting features, etc.) The main element of the project (CORE) is then the implementation and test of the application, including the required user clients, the server and the database. After test imports of the data, the single channel analysis can be executed. This can be seen as a special analytical method (project) including structural and social measurements, visual structural and social network analysis, keyword and content analysis and egonet and growth/evolvement analysis to see your networks' dynamics. After successful single channel analysis, a multi channel monitoring can be optionally added (E3). It will include the definition of data integration and transformation procedures and another analysis iteration. Finally, the project can be manifested with continual monitoring (E4) to have a continuous monitor running which includes new communication data on a real-time basis. Commetrix Project Approach. The figure also implies that the steps 5 to 7 (implementing the tool and conducting the analysis) are the CORE PROJECT. All other blocks are optional extensions (E for extension). E1 and E2 are highly recommended to elicit the most value out of your analysis project. E3 and E4 can extend the picture and application. E3 and E4 are currently in research and development stage, therefore we invite you to become a project partner on a self-cost-base. Your contact. If you want to learn more or engage in one of the cooperation scenarios above, please contact: info[at]commetrix[dot]net .. ACADEMIC APPLICATION II Academic Research Cooperation. Coming from academic research ourselves and knowing that the software can be quite valuable for exploring and analyzing network datasets, we will be very happy to assist researchers in better understanding their datasets with complementing visualizations and the extraction of main network cores and clusters. Currently, we also intend to provide this service free to a selected set of projects in order to collaboratively explore the opportunities of the tool for research. We might be able to help you by transforming a dataset, that you previously stored in a specified format. But please understand that when the efforts to collaborate require additional development work we would need a little funding for letting some person do the job. With these projects we want to form a kind of a beta-user research collaboration community of people interested in the framework and in the topic. If you are interested in participating, please write an e-mail to info[at]commetrix[dot]net In parallel we will be working on a mode to let people use the software without our help, still that is not completed yet. We will probably request a very small license fee to cover all the efforts of the past years. We hope you understand this. Please stay tuned to learn more about this researcher license model and also read the previous paragraph to learn about our plans to create a research community for researchers interested in collaborating based on the tool. .. PERSONAL APPLICATION / GENERAL INTEREST III Individual (private) Users. Next to seeking project partnerships with professionals, we also want to encourage other private users who wants to see and analyze electronic communication in e-mail, instant messaging or (nntp, php, slashdot) newsgroups.

> Collaboration and Software Installation

How can YOU EMPLOY Commetrix? We want to engage in network oriented Systems Analysis in communication and collaboration contexts, e.g. in a corporate application, in a research setting, and in the furture even in a personal end-user context. However, due to time constraints and recent requests we decided to start with corporate and academic collaborations.

Click here, if you are a researcher, interested in using Commetrix and in collaborating in an international user community we plan to develop around the software framework.

Click here, if you want to support your corporation with the software framework and want to learn more about possible application scenarios.

Click here, if you are a private person and you want to learn more about how the Framework can be beneficial for your personal context.

However, although the underlying functionality is provided by the tool, eliciting value by understanding connections between a multitude of networked people is not easily done. It can require the development of individual connectors to access existing data sources or the adaptation of the tool to meet your individual reporting and analysis needs - tailoring the tool to your special application area (see above). This is why in most scenarios we suggest a cooperation in a project form.

CORPORATE APPLICATION

Corporate application objectives can be:

understanding your customer communities
understanding your employee communities
showing the communication/collaboration patterns in cross-organizational collaborations
eliciting the core structures in massive electronic communication networks
providing ego-centred 'ego-networks' for busy people with diverse contacts
visualizing and measuring the agility and the speed of a network
monitoring the evolvement and growth of customer communities
trace special events and their effect on the communication behaviour
elicit a topic and expert map from past electronic communication
identifying clusters of your community working on topics
and many more, as you will probably tell us.

I Corporate Users. Commetrix software tools can be licensed, and consulting on the method and the software (usually connected to a initial collaboration project for adapting the software to a use case) is possible. You can contact it via the e-mail adress below to initiate a discussion of your demand and to identify possible solutions based on the Commetrix framework.

To give you a feeling for what could be done and how, please read this little generic overview about collaboration projects. for corporate users, generally two methods of tool-supported network analysis apply: Single channel analysis and multiple channel analysis. The latter includes the integration of various communication channel to derive the whole picture of the invisible networks and pathways in the origanization.

Ia Corporate Single channel analysis project: We seek project partners, who are interested in discovering and analyzing their corporate communication networks. This can elicit groups of experts engaged in furthering various corporate issues or simply give insights about existing communities to elicit their active and inactive parts. Object of analysis can be the e-mail network, a discussion group, instant messaging, or even VoIP usage. The project could also be targeted at understanding and analyzing customer communities. Dynamic analysis can show the parts with largest growth or decline or alert when sudden changes and dynamics occur. If you are interested in this option, please send an e-mail to info@trilexis.com. (also see CORE below)

Ib Corporate Multiple channel analysis project: This project proposal will tap the full potential of visualizing virtual communication and collaboration. We seek a project partner to identify and elicit various channels of communication and collaboration, including joint meetings of people, joint document authorship, joint team actions, and of course communication traces. This will allow to create a picture of the real work patterns in a corporation. As multichannel analysis is still in its research stage, we currently linvite project partners, who are willing to cooperate in this research on a self-cost-base, i.e. by funding the costs of this exploratory venture. This will primarily include the costs of capturing requirements and data plus the costs of developing the necessary integration transformations. If you are interested in this option, please send an e-mail to info[at]commetrix[dot]net

Project approach. We suggest the following project proceddure (see figure below). After defining your project's objectives and selecting your communication channels (E1) , we will check the availability of those channels for analysis. The next step (E2) can be necessary to develop the required connectors to capture data from the selected data sources, i.e. communication channels. Further, according to the project objectives, it can be required to develop extended analysis and visualization functionality to meet your personal monitoring needs (alerting functions, special coloring methods, reporting features, etc.)
The main element of the project (CORE) is then the implementation and test of the application, including the required user clients, the server and the database. After test imports of the data, the single channel analysis can be executed. This can be seen as a special analytical method (project) including structural and social measurements, visual structural and social network analysis, keyword and content analysis and egonet and growth/evolvement analysis to see your networks' dynamics.
After successful single channel analysis, a multi channel monitoring can be optionally added (E3). It will include the definition of data integration and transformation procedures and another analysis iteration. Finally, the project can be manifested with continual monitoring (E4) to have a continuous monitor running which includes new communication data on a real-time basis.

Commetrix Project Approach.

The figure also implies that the steps 5 to 7 (implementing the tool and conducting the analysis) are the CORE PROJECT. All other blocks are optional extensions (E for extension). E1 and E2 are highly recommended to elicit the most value out of your analysis project. E3 and E4 can extend the picture and application. E3 and E4 are currently in research and development stage, therefore we invite you to become a project partner on a self-cost-base.

Your contact. If you want to learn more or engage in one of the cooperation scenarios above, please contact:
info[at]commetrix[dot]net

ACADEMIC APPLICATION

II Academic Research Cooperation. Coming from academic research ourselves and knowing that the software can be quite valuable for exploring and analyzing network datasets, we will be very happy to assist researchers in better understanding their datasets with complementing visualizations and the extraction of main network cores and clusters.

Currently, we also intend to provide this service free to a selected set of projects in order to collaboratively explore the opportunities of the tool for research. We might be able to help you by transforming a dataset, that you previously stored in a specified format. But please understand that when the efforts to collaborate require additional development work we would need a little funding for letting some person do the job. With these projects we want to form a kind of a beta-user research collaboration community of people interested in the framework and in the topic. If you are interested in participating, please write an e-mail to info[at]commetrix[dot]net

In parallel we will be working on a mode to let people use the software without our help, still that is not completed yet. We will probably request a very small license fee to cover all the efforts of the past years. We hope you understand this. Please stay tuned to learn more about this researcher license model and also read the previous paragraph to learn about our plans to create a research community for researchers interested in collaborating based on the tool.

PERSONAL APPLICATION / GENERAL INTEREST

III Individual (private) Users. Next to seeking project partnerships with professionals, we also want to encourage other private users who wants to see and analyze electronic communication in e-mail, instant messaging or (nntp, php, slashdot) newsgroups.