Google Group Members Evolution Visualization using Gource: Our Python Local User Group Analyzed!

Hi all,

Yesterday I lectured a keynote introducing Python Platform and 8 reasons of why I should know about it at our local group meeting of Python user at Pernambuco, Brazil.  It was a great lecture and I believe that attracted more and more people to learn Python platform. However, while I was preparing my presentation I decided also to present some statistics about our local group (PUG-PE).  It is a local community of python developers that was created at July's 2007 and since its beginning it started to grow up quickly by many events, specifically live events, lectures and dojos organized by the group.

In my last lectures I always presented a simple line chart showing the evolution at the number of new members joining the group through the time, such as like this one below:

PUG-PE Discussion List Members Growing since 2007

But sometime ago I came into a great visualization tool called Gource, a project for visualizing the control's version history of softwares (using GIT, SVN, etc.).  It is a beautiful visualization, specifically because it shows interactively all the history of commits of your project.  Then, I realized that I could adapt the tool to process a custom log of all the history of the local group and generate a visualization of the simulation in the evolution of number of new members  since the foundation of group until now.  The data was extracted for our discussion list, that it is hosted at Google Groups.  Writing some lines of code in Python I created a simple custom log as input for the Gource tool.  You can find the script here. 

The source data was fetched by exporting the list all members at the section 'Management Tasks' of the Google Group. 

Each node represents a new user that joined the group and the unique users represents the events that triggered the new participations in the group such as local courses, local meetings, etc.  For generating the video you can easily use the command presented here at this blog ( I recorded the video using the ffmpeg tool at Ubuntu 10.04).  You may also easily adapt the script above for your personal use to check out the evolution of your discussion list at Google Groups.  

The result of this experiment is shown here at this video:

Don't forget when you run the command to put the flag -i  with a big value in seconds (e.g. -i 600 ) for maintaining the number of nodes presented during all the simulation (If you suppress this flag the nodes will disappear after a certain time).

I expect you enjoy,

Marcel Caraciolo