TeCFlow - Identify Key Roles in Communities

With TeCFlow the various roles in COINs can be found. The picture below is a snapshot view – produced using TeCFlow – of the communication pattern of a typical COIN, in this case a working group of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) over nine months. The more e-mails two people exchange, the closer to each other they are located in the figure. People sending or receiving the highest total number of messages are in the center and comprise the core group, whose members are, to a large extent, communicating amongst themselves.

The picutre shows the three-ring structure of the COIN ripple effect, with an inner core of about five to seven people, a middle-circle CLN of 15 to 20 people who are still quite well networked into the core group, and an affiliated CIN of people who are only connected to one or two core team members.

Our research has analyzed the communication behavior of the core participants of a COIN by looking at how many e-mail messages team members sent and received. We also determined whether the recipients of these messages were other core team members or people outside the core team. We defined what we call the “contribution index” to measure the level of active participation of an individual in the community. If an individual only sends messages and receives no messages, her contribution index is +1. It is –1 if she only receives messages and never sends a message. If the communication behavior is totally balanced – that is, the number of messages sent and received is the same – the contribution index is 0.

Looking at a large number of innovation networks, we identified four different role patterns for creators (gurus), communicators (ambassadors), collaborators (expediters), and knowledge experts. The picture below shows the contribution index pattern.

The COIN leaders emerge by examining the group communication pattern from e-mail traffic (as pictured above).

This link brings up an in-depth case study of how TeCFlow is used to analyse key roles in communities.