Josh Tyler, Dennis Wilkinson, and Bernardo A. Huberman
HP Laboratories
Palo Alto, CA 94304
Abstract
We describe a methodology for the automatic identification of communities
of practice from email logs within an organization. We use a
betweeness centrality algorithm that can rapidly find communities
within a graph representing information flows. We apply this algorithm
to an email corpus of nearly one million messages collected over a
two-month span, and show that the method is effective at identifying
true communities, both formal and informal, within these scale-free
graphs. This approach also enables the identification of leadership
roles within the communities. These studies are complemented by a
qualitative evaluation of the results in the field.
Full paper: email.pdf
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