The document discusses the development of Gephi, an open-source network analysis and visualization software. It describes Gephi starting as a student project with 1 user, and growing to have 5,000 regular users through a three step process: 1) initial research and prototyping, 2) innovating for early supporters, and 3) dominating the market. It provides timelines and details for each step. The document also provides examples of how Gephi has enabled novel products and analyses for applications like mapping innovation, adverse drug reactions, social gaming monitoring, and more.

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Gephi:
An innovative process of design
for enhancing innovation
S´bastien Heymann
e
13 July 2012

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Agenda
1 Introduction to networks
2 Exploratory Network Analysis
3 What is Gephi?
4 Our highway to success
5 Transformative power
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Gephi
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4. Highway to success

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How to start from nothing to 50,000 downloads per release?
How to start with 5 users to reach 5,000 regular users?
How to go from a student project to an industrial-quality product?
We started with no plan.
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3 steps
1 Research for your own use: fix something which is scratching
you.
2 Innovate for you and your small user base. Build a prototype,
iterate and fail quickly, make noise on the Web.
3 Dominate your market. Trash your prototype and write
another software from scratch for the long-term. Focus on:
scaling (source code), scaling (big data), and scaling
(dev+user community).
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Timeline
Dominate the
market*
Innovate for your
Research for your early supporters
own pleasure
Hello world! 1 regular user 100 regular users 5,000 regular users
0 6 24 54 Months
*We are here :-)
What people “LOL” “promising” “amazing”
said about us: “this is shit: can’t do X” “I want to play with “my wife is using it”
“already done 20yrs ago” it, let’s find data” “the reference”
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Step 1: research (Graphiltre)
Duration: 6 months
Who: Mathieu Jacomy
Development
• Don’t care about re-usability: go fast, use, iterate until a
novel approach to the problem of network exploration
emerges.
UI
• Design statement: responsive rendering engine + graph filters
+ no scripting.
Community management
• Discuss around you. Find support. Not necessary your mom.
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Step 2: innovate (Gephi 0.6)
Duration: 18 months
Who: Mathieu Bastian + S´bastien Heymann
e
Development
• Trash everything, write source code from scratch with the
final vision in mind. Try to code it clean (hint: you will fail).
UI
• Take care about usability to figure out real issues.
Community management
• Make it Open Source. Build a website, forum and Twitter
account. Commit early successes. Record a video to go viral.
Listen to novel ideas, discuss the roadmap. Create a
(non-profit) company. Stay calm: you’ll be insulted.
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Step 3: dominate (Gephi 0.7+)
Duration: 30 months so far
Who: the team (44 people so far)
Development
• Trash everything, write source code from scratch with the real
issues in mind. Make it modular (APIs) for the long-term and
other developers. The software has become a platform.
UI
• Make room for unpredictable usages: design extensibility with
plug-ins, fix the ”first 30 minutes with Gephi for a newcomer”.
Community management
• Build on trust. Acknowledge issues. Communicate on user’s
achievements. Meet them. Help users meet and build local
communities. Engage them to contribute. YOU are the little
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hands.
S´bastien Heymann — Gephi: An innovative process of design for enhancing innovation — 13 July 2012

11. Transformative power
Example of novel products

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Quid, Inc: mapping innovation
To drive market-driven innovation of large companies.
How: scientific papers + patents + Web doc clustering and
exploration of documents linked by similarity measures.
Viz Tech buit on top of Gephi Platform.
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Adverse Drug Event analysis
To find novel correlations of problematic drug-drug reactions.
How: database visualization
Cluster of drugs that are used to fight cancer. Source: Cloudera, Inc
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VisIR mapping of
innovation landscape
To monitor the activities of the Pˆle de comp´titivit´ ”
o e e Images et
R´seaux” (Bretagne).
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How: open data process + text mining + dashboard
Not Gephi, which is used beforehand. Source: Franck Ghitalla
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isCool Entertainment:
social gaming monitoring
To identify cheaters of Facebook games (multi-accounts).
How: visual cluster detection of user interactions.
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Indiana Univ: Truthy
To detect misinformation spread on Twitter
How: statistical + visual detection of suscpicious diffusion
patterns.
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LinkedIn inMaps
To let users visualize their own social network on 1 click.
How: web UI + server cluster + algorithms taken from Gephi
http://inmaps.linkedinlabs.com
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Bio4j: Gene ontology annotation
To explore large ontologies and detect flaws in databases.
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Wikileaks doc exploration
To find meaningful
information for
investigative journalists.
How: doc clustering +
co-occurrence analysis
Iraq War Logs. Source: Jonathan Stray
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21. Thank you!
Gephi: An innovative process of design for enhancing innovation
ECIU Summer School 2012
<seb@gephi.org>