Online communities have increased in size and importance dramatically over the last decade. The fact that many communities are online means that it is possible to extract information about these communities and the connections between their members much more easily using software tools, despite their potentially very large size. The links between members of the community can be presented visually and often this can make patterns in the structure of sub-communities immediately obvious. The links and structures of layered communities can also be formalized to gain a better understanding of their modelling. This paper explores these links with some specific examples, including visualization of these relationships and a formalized model of communities using the Z notation. It also considers the development of such communities within the Community of Practice social science framework. Such approaches may be applicable for communities associated with cybersecurity and could be combined for a better understanding of their development.

1. Online Communities:
Visualization and Formalization
Prof. Jonathan P. Bowen
Museophile Limited, Oxford, UK
www.jpbowen.com

2. Abingdon School
3rd win in a row at Henley Royal Regatta on
7th July 2013, breaking previous record time.

3. Overview
• Online communities
• Visualization tools
• Formalization in Z
• Community of Practice
• Application to cybersecurity?

4. Communities
• Community of Practice
(CoP) – collection of people
developing domain knowledge
• Different communities
– cybersecurity, Z notation, visualization, ...
• Body of Knowledge (BoK)
– ontology for a particular domain
• Interdisciplinarity vs. Multidisciplinarity

5. Types of community
• CoP on Wikipedia:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_of_practice
• Online CoP (OCoP):
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_community_of_practice
Other types of community
• Virtual community:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Virtual_communities
• Community of interest:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_of_interest

6. Example – two communities
(arts and science)
Facebook
TouchGraph
connections
Visualization

7. Top 30 co-
authors as
measured by
the number of
publications
Academic
Search
co-author
graph

8. Academic Search citation graph
• Top 34 authors by number of citations

9. Supervisors and
students
Alonzo Church
and Alan Turing
Academic
Search
genealogy
graph
See also
Mathematics
Genealogy
website

10. The Erdős number
• Paul Erdős (1913–1996)
– Hungarian mathematician
– en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Erdős
– Erdős number 0
– Co-authored over 1,000 publications
• 511 co-authors
– Erdős number 1
– Co-authors of Erdős co-authors
• Erdős number 2
• Etc.

11. Academic
Search
co-author
path
Robin Wilson,
mathematician and
co-author/editor
(Erdős number 1)

12. Links to
chair
Jonathan Bowen
and David
Llewellyn-Jones
via Carlos Delgado
Kloos and
Madjid Merabti

13. Links by co-authorship
Jonathan Bowen and ...

14. Formalization in Z
• Sets of names of people and communities

15. State 1
• Links between people
• Memberships of communities

16. State 2
• People without links to others
• Entities with no community membership
• People with no links to them from others

17. State 3
• Stronger constraints

18. State 4
• People are not linked to themselves
• Communities cannot be (transitively)
members of themselves
• ...+ is irreflexive transitive closure

19. State 5
• Top-level communities
• People are linked in some way

20. Status operation
• People (output linked!) directly linked from
a particular person (input p?)
• (|...|) is relational image

21. Status operation
• People (common!) directly linked from two
other specific people (p1? and p2?)

22. Status operation
• Communities (transitively) associated with a
particular person (p?)

23. Community of Practice (CoP)
Social sciences concept
• Wenger, E.: Communities of Practice:
Learning, Meaning, and Identity.
Cambridge University Press, Cambridge
(1998)
• Wenger, E., McDermott, R.A., Snyder,
W.: Cultivating Communities of Practice:
A guide to managing knowledge. Harvard
Business School Press, Boston (2002)
• A brief introduction by Etienne Wenger, 2006:
www.ewenger.com/theory

24. Fundamental elements of a CoP
1. Domain: Common interest to be
effective. E.g., cybersecurity.
2. Community: Group of people willing
to engage with others. E.g., security
experts, technology experts,
sociologists, etc.
3. Practice: Explore existing and
develop new knowledge. Use of
security and networked IT expertise.

25. Stages of community development
1. Potential
2. Coalescing
3. Maturing
4. Stewardship
5. Transformation

26. Cultivating a CoP
1. Design a CoP to evolve naturally.
2. Create opportunities for open discussion.
3. Welcome and allow different levels of
participation.

27. The Dark Side ...
The project that dares not speak its name ...

28. Conclusion
Prof. Jonathan Bowen
jonathan.bowen@lsbu.ac.uk
www.jpbowen.com
• Online communities
• Visualization tools
• Formalization (e.g., in Z)
• Community of Practice (CoP)
• Application to cybersecurity?

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• Free entry
• Local history
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