To put our new knowledge about graphs and social networks to use, we will use data about the software developers working on free, libre, and open source (FLOSS) projects developed using the Ruby programming language. As we learned in Chapter 3, Entity Matching when we tackled entity matching between projects, many Ruby programmers used the website RubyForge.org between 2003 and 2013 to create projects and collaborate. In this chapter, we are going to use this same data to learn how the social structure of this community changed over those ten years.
RubyForge developers can be placed into a social network where the developers themselves are the nodes or vertices, and the fact that they worked on a project together represents the edge or link between the nodes. We could also count how many projects they worked on together to create a weight for the link. If two developers only worked together once, the link is weaker than if the two developers worked together on dozens of projects...
