code_swarm. An experiment in organic software visualization es una aplicación desarrolada por Michael Ogawa con Processing, que recoge los dados a cerca de la historia de una comunida open source / free software y les visualiza en un video. Aquí hay el video del proyecto Python:

code_swarm – Python from Michael Ogawa on Vimeo.

I’ve been studying software projects for a while now. Not the programming, but the people — the way they interact with each other through collaboration and communication.

This visualization, called code_swarm, shows the history of commits in a software project. A commit happens when a developer makes changes to the code or documents and transfers them into the central project repository. Both developers and files are represented as moving elements. When a developer commits a file, it lights up and flies towards that developer. Files are colored according to their purpose, such as whether they are source code or a document. If files or developers have not been active for a while, they will fade away. A histogram at the bottom keeps a reminder of what has come before.

En este proyecto la visualización de la complejidad de la comunidad no viene de dados recogido por usuarios, software o instrumentos y herramientas, sino de dados ya recogido automáticamente acerca del comportamiento de los usuarios al utilizar unos software en un red. En esta manera podemos visualizar la dedicación de cada usuario a la actividad colectiva y la historia del sistema.

El software utiliza los dados que vienen desde los commit que los usuarios hacen modificando del codigo compartido utilizando:

[…]version control systems for source code such as Subversion or Concurrent Versions System. A commit in the context of these version control systems refers to submitting the latest changes of the source code to the repository, and making these changes part of the head revision of the repository. Thus, when other users do an UPDATE or a checkout from the repository, they will receive the latest committed version, unless they specify they wish to retrieve a previous version of the source code in the repository. Version control systems also have similar functionality to SQL databases in that they allow rolling back to previous versions easily. In this context, a commit with version control systems is not as dangerous as it allows easy rollback, even after the commit has been done.

Code_swarm puede ser utilizado en aquellas comunidades que utilizan estos softwares para auto-organizars. Además, el codigo ha sido publicado de manera gratuita y libre bajo de una licencia GPL v3 license en Google Code. Entonces podemos utilizarlo también en nuestros proyectos, para visualizar la vida/historia de las Comunidades Open P2P: podemos modificar el codigo para poderlo utilizar también con las herramientas y los softwares especificos que cada comunidad utiliza para comunicar y auto-organizarse.

fuente | www.openp2pdesign.org

via | Ossblog