Dr. Cuihua (Cindy) Shen, assistant professor of Emerging Media and Communication at University of Texas Dallas, has found that birds of a feather also flock together in cyberspace.
Shen used social network analysis to examine an online community, a group of users from SourceForge, and tested the social drivers that shaped the collaboration dynamics.
“Who Connects with Whom? A Social Network Analysis of an Online Open Source Software Community”, co-written by Peter Monge and published in the journal First Monday, shows that users in online communities choose which users to interact with, and that their choices reveal the motivations and processes that create collective networks.