On Thursday, 8th of September, we organized the first Gephi meetup in Berlin at the city’s coworking hub betahaus.

In that session Dmitry Paranyushkin from Nodus Labs demonstrated how Gephi works using as an example the group of 12 people who were attending the workshop. Using Data Laboratory in Gephi we added each attendee as a node and represented their relations as edges. Then after running some key metrics we could see who is the most influential person in the group (highest betweenness centrality) and what would be the possible strategies for the other, less connected members, to get more influence in the group.

We then moved on to analyze our Facebook friend networks, using netvizz Facebook application by Berhnard Rieder and Gephi. Running some basic metrics and filters allows one to see the most connected and influential persons among your Facebook friends, as well as detect distinct subgroups in your community. These subgroups can then be analyzed in isolation from the rest of the network to get more insight into their structure and distribution of power (connections) within. What’s interesting is that visual representation of your Facebook network allows you to see what individuals or groups you could potentially connect.

The next Gephi meetup will happen on the 1st of October as a part of Beta People festival organized at betahaus. There will be lots of other interesting talks and workshops on that day.

To see the page of that past event on Facebook and meet the participants, click here.