Joshua R. Tyler, Dennis M. Wilkinson and Bernardo A. Huberman
We describe a method for the automatic identification of communities of practice
from email logs within an organization. We use a betweenness centrality algorithm
that can rapidly find communities within a graph representing information flows.
We apply this algorithm to an initial 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.