[Bigbang-dev] Bipartite graphs of working group and affiliations

[Nick Doty]

On Jun 9, 2020, at 1:19 PM, Sebastian Benthall <sbenthall at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Thanks for this, Nick.
> 
> That reminds me: I'm on the hook to get Nels a list of top 100 affiliations for categorization.
> 
> This visualization is noting affiliations of draft authors only. Not general discussion participants. I'm not sure if the IETF data tracker has lighter weight documents in it that might pick up wider participation. Any ideas what those would be called? Are "comments" a tracked document type?

Hmm… the Datatracker seems to have pretty detailed logs of the IESG ballots/comments about approving documents before RFC publication. Those are certainly interesting, and it could be valuable to see when DISCUSSes (which are detailed objections to a spec before it moves forward) arise, which Area Directors they come from, etc. But I don’t think it’ll help you with a network analysis, because the whole purpose of the IESG review is that it’s people from every topic area providing a vote on each document — it’s a small group of people and the point is to avoid modularity/insularity.

> One thing that *might* pop out of a more extensive mapping (longer time scale, etc) is some kind of modular structure to the network. It might *not* be there, an it could be one big hairball that doesn't tell us much. But I wonder if you would expect, based on qualitative experience and intuition, any clustering?

I would expect clustering/modularity by topic area, and at least somewhat aligned with IETF’s areas division: https://ietf.org/topics/areas/ <https://ietf.org/topics/areas/>
I think we saw this in the graphs of IETF people-mailinglists bipartite graph, where e.g. the transport WGs are connected together by overlap in their participants, and the application area has more closeness to the security area, etc. While some massive corporations are going to be connected to many groups, particularly if it’s limited to authorship (which requires some real financial investment from a company in terms of dedicated staff time), I would expect to see networking-based companies represented in the lower layer protocols/groups and consumer tech companies more represented in the applications and higher layer protocols. I’d be curious to know if civil society or academia is present in some of those places and not others. I know that in my own work on privacy I tend to stay at higher-level protocols but I don’t know if that’s common among advocates more generally.

Cheers,
Nick

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