code_swarm – Python from Michael Ogawa on Vimeo.

I’ve been studying software projects for a while now. Not the programming, but the people — the way they interact with each other through collaboration and communication.

This visualization, called code_swarm, shows the history of commits in a software project. A commit happens when a developer makes changes to the code or documents and transfers them into the central project repository. Both developers and files are represented as moving elements. When a developer commits a file, it lights up and flies towards that developer. Files are colored according to their purpose, such as whether they are source code or a document. If files or developers have not been active for a while, they will fade away. A histogram at the bottom keeps a reminder of what has come before.

Here the visualization of the complexity of the community comes not from data gathered by the users or by devices or software, but from data already and automatically gathered about the users’ behaviour using some specific software over a network. In this way we can visualize the commitment of every participants to the collective activity and the history of the system.

A commit is done for:

[...]version control systems for source code such as Subversion or Concurrent Versions System. A commit in the context of these version control systems refers to submitting the latest changes of the source code to the repository, and making these changes part of the head revision of the repository. Thus, when other users do an UPDATE or a checkout from the repository, they will receive the latest committed version, unless they specify they wish to retrieve a previous version of the source code in the repository. Version control systems also have similar functionality to SQL databases in that they allow rolling back to previous versions easily. In this context, a commit with version control systems is not as dangerous as it allows easy rollback, even after the commit has been done.

Code_swarm can be used therefore for those communities that use this software in order to self-organize. Moreover, the code has been released openly and freely under a GPL v3 license on Google Code. Therefore we can use it on our projects too, in order to visualize the life/history of Open P2P Communities: we can modify its source code in order to run it for every community and its specific tools for communication and self-organization.

via | Ossblog