1 October 202510 April 2026 by Martin Grandjean

What’s new for Gephi? Echoes from Gephi Week 2025

Nantes 2025

The Gephi Week aspires to be a yearly event where the team and some community members gather to work on the project. The first iteration was in 2021 in Copenhagen (see debrief), and it has happened every year since except in 2023. This year’s edition was hosted by OuestWare in Nantes, France (OuestWare is the team developing Gephi Lite, but it is also a company that does a lot of other projects). The working space was sponsored by the Nantes company UmanIT.

Here is a debrief of what we have done during this edition!

Cover picture: the Gephi Week 2025 team (Martin Grandjean)

1. Gephi ecosystem

New Gephi Lite 1.0

Gephi Lite has been out and running for a while now, and it is now time for a complete UX overhaul! The team (Alexis Jacomy, Paul Girard and Benoit Simard) worked with Arthur Desaintjan a (UX design intern) for a semester to rethink the entire user interface, taking into account the feedback of many users. From this process came out a brand new visual language and layout for the tool, that we are very excited to release very soon. Learn more about this design process in this blog post.

Because we think Gephi Lite will be complete enough, it will move into “1.0” territory. Gephi Desktop was overtaken! More on Gephi Lite 1.0 in a separate post.

▲ The OuestWare team, behind Gephi Lite. Photos: Matthieu Totet

Headless Gephi with Python : Gephipy

A recurrent demand by members of the community is to have an automated pipeline for Gephi-based analysis. During Gephi Week, this concern was reiterated by our colleagues at Agoratlas, Mathis Hammel, Florent Lefebvre, and Clément Hammel.

We do think that Gephi is, by essence, always about visual and interactive user interface. Nevertheless, it’s an interesting and recurring discussion that we had with users. The current official solution would be to use the Gephi toolkit, a headless (= no ui) version of Gephi that allows you to use all Gephi features in your own java application. It’s convenient for Java developers, but most Gephi users are more used to Python using Jupyter Notebook.

So Benoît Simard, with the help of Matthieu Totet, had a quick look on the state of art of interfacing Python and Java and found JPype. This library allows you to load a java library into a Python environment and use it as a normal python library.

It does work nicely out of the box, but then it has been noticed the way to use the toolbox isn’t quite straight forward and it could be simplified so that there would be a more Pythonic way to use the library.

The result of this is a library : Gephipy. This library is available on Pypi and is a wrapper around the Gephi java toolkit that allows you to use Gephi functionality in a Python script or in a Jupyter Notebook.

Keep in mind it’s just an experiment that we make it available and open source so people have a starting point if they need to develop with the headless use case in mind. There is definitely still a lot to do and continue to have a proper python wrapper, but if you are courageous enough, it’s technically possible to use Gephi as a Python library !

At this occasion, we also started the creation of a Gephi organization in PyPI (pending for approval).

▲ As Matthieu Totet is our official photographer, there are few photos of him working on Gephipy, but here is some evidence that it was tiring work requiring mental preparation. Photos: Martin Grandjean

New Viz engine integration

For many years, our lead dev Eduardo Ramos Ibanez has been working on a new visualization engine for Gephi (desktop). This was already an important point of the first Gephi Week in 2021.

Maintenance and performance are at stake. The current engine’s technology dating back to 2008, we had decided to rewrite it from scratch. That way, we could leverage modern OpenGL versions and unlock greater performance. Rewriting a core Gephi module is never easy but we have done it before and doing so also unlocks future improvements and enhanced maintainability. The new engine had been worked in a separate repository, to iterate faster. Prior to the Gephi Week, we had decided that it was now time to finish the integration work and clean-up all of the old engine’s code.

Mathieu Bastian, Matthieu Totet and Eduardo Ramos Ibanez have made a lot of progress in the integration work. The last big missing piece is to render text, and hope to tackle that soon.

Preparing for Gephi 0.11

Integrating the new visualization engine and enhancing its reliability and performance is the main goal for the next Gephi release. We hope to be able to release the 0.11 version by the end of this year.

We also performed maintenance tasks and small improvements, to ensure the software remains up-to-date. Notably, we migrated to the latest version of the Netbeans Platform.

Gephi Web Viewer

We discussed the opportunity to create a new Gephi tool. Sharing a network from Gephi on the web for reading has been a thing from the very beginning (Girard et al. 2024). Recently we added a plugin in Gephi desktop to export a graph on the web using Retina, so we discussed the opportunity to transform Retina into an official Gephi web viewer that could be used from Gephi or Gephi Lite.

Change the icons in Gephi Desktop

Gephi had been using pixel-based icons like in the 90s. It was pretty ugly, even though some may find it charming. That will be gone: we replaced all the icons with a homogeneous design language, following the suggestions of Côme Brocas in 2021.

These new icons will be compatible with the dark mode, and will make the UI more calm, allowing you to better focus on your network.

2. Communication and community

Revamping the website

We had not changed the Gephi website in a very long while!

The main screenshot was outdated by a decade or so… But most importantly, we wanted to make it clear that Gephi Lite was there, and we wanted to make room for it. Our main goal was to have a clear path to Gephi Lite from the landing page.And of course many things ensued, such as redefining the structure of the website etc. We tried to reduce the amount of pages to ease maintenance while making sure all important information is there. We used Astro as an infrastructure to build the new version.

▲ Co-designing a new website for Gephi requires great creative minds… and coffee. Photos: Matthieu Totet

Writing new tutorials

Even if the interface and user experience are well designed, a tool as complex as Gephi must be documented with tutorials. But the Gephi team already has a lot on its plate and the more pages and resources we create, the more things we have to maintain, so we have always been grateful for the community to have written multiple series of great tutorials. We encourage all users to produce their own tutorials, because what novice users need is not always technical documentation but a walkthrough of the main features, in an order and using teaching methods that may be specific to different areas of application.

However, we do think that it is also important to new users that they can find the most basic tutorials on the website directly. It’s important to note that we are about to have new user interface choices for both Gephi Lite (major rework) and Gephi Desktop (minor changes but still significant). This called for making an up to date version of the basic tutorials.

That’s why we decided to create a short introduction to Gephi, as simple and universal as possible. This was taken in charge by a few prolific tutorial makers in the community, namely Martin Grandjean, Veronica Espinoza, and Tommaso Venturini. We decided to go for parallel tutorials between the Desktop and Lite versions of Gephi to help users knowing one going to the other.

▲ Gephi tutorials: Less talk and more shared documents! Photos: Matthieu Totet

New FAQ

You probably know about the strength of weak ties, Granovetter’s famous argument. In short, in your relational network, people less close to you (weak ties) can reach resources you don’t otherwise have access to (they are strong).

We had the chance to have Veronica Espinoza with us. In case you don’t know her, she has been writing a lot on various network analysis tools for PhD students and social science and humanities scholars. And she’s based in Mexico. Precisely because she is confronted to a public that we don’t usually have access to, she had a set of very fruitful comments on Gephi as a tool and as a project. A good illustration of Granovetter’s principle!

We have used her feedback as the basis for a FAQ section in the new website, about using Gephi, but also about a range of other things related to the project or the community.

▲ Discussing user needs and frequently asked questions. Photos: Matthieu Totet

Documentation

In 2022, during the Gephi Week in Paris, we had set up a new online platform to host the documentation. But we had not used it much yet. Progress in the project created that need again, and we decided to definitively move in this new infrastructure.

We decommissioned the old Gephi Wiki, which we froze into an accessible archive.

We will release the new documentation portal with the minimum viable information, and we will gradually go through the wiki to fill the new documentation with relevant and updated content.

3. Project life

Governance

During a Gephi Week, there is always the need to discuss and improve the project’s life. This year’s focus was on governance.

We had the help of Celya Gruson-Daniel to accompany us in the process of formalizing how we function as a collective, and become better at onboarding new members.

Part of this process will be to integrate the project’s life more firmly into the Open Collective platform, and facilitate donations through the platform. This will make the project more transparent and easier to manage.

▲ Discussing Gephi governance, finances and community with Celya Gruson-Daniel. Photos: Matthieu Totet

Documenting the project in video

Like the Paris 2022 edition, we had the chance to have Nicolas “Datalgo” Bouchaib with us. We were able to have live streams every day to talk about data science and network analysis in French and English, and provide insights into the project in video.

▲ Gephi live on Twitch. Photos: Matthieu Totet

Acknowledgements

Thank you to our sponsors UmanIT who welcomed us very generously in their own open space. It was a blast having such a nice place to work in.

Thanks also to OuestWare for sponsoring the food and some of the accomodation.

Additional pictures of the event

27 September 202327 September 2023 by Clement

14 ways you can contribute to Gephi

> this blog post is a cross-posting from the blog of nocodefunctions.com, which is a companion toolbox for Gephi developed by the author.

How can we give back to Gephi so that it continues to thrive in the years to come?

I am not steering Gephi, so please do not take the following as anything “official” nor definitive on the topic. Please check the recent posts on the Gephi blog by Mathieu Jacomy and Mathieu Bastian to get the latest views from the core Gephi team.

Ok, let’s dive in:

Interests should be aligned – and money makes things complicated

Gephi is used by a large diversity of actors: students to governments, librarians, academics and professional scientometricians, dataviz designers, social media listeners, citizen journalists, fraud detection analysts and NGO volunteers to professional osint and infosec specialists and many more.

In this list of users, companies would have been natural contributors to the development of Gephi: “take my money, and in exchange I have a voice in Gephi to develop this or that feature”. However Gephi is a free and open source software, and it will not accept funding in return for a right to control how it is developed.

This stance is not a mistake nor a handicap! It is a conscious choice to evolve Gephi for all – not just in the direction that is set by the stakeholders which can fund it. But as a result, a very common resource – funding money – is not directly available to Gephi.

This simple absence of a market mechanism (I buy, you deliver) prevented Gephi from accessing resources that would have been so useful – and it is also why I esteem and respect the team who develops this software for so long, to provide it as a digital commons.

So, are we stuck? No!

There are many alternatives to contribute to Gephi, in ways that make the best of your abilities AND with tangible feedbacks beyond the existence of Gephi itself.

This blog post will be expanded as I get your feedback: do you see new ways to support Gephi? Would you like to be cited as a contact point for any of those?

Are you a company or for-profit organization?

1. Fund Gephi, despite the hurdles

At the moment, there is no legal entity that is set to accept funding for Gephi, though it is bound to come one day. However, events sponsored by Gephi could still receive funding, through the university that will host the event or a similar channel?

What to expect from it?

The 2nd edition of the Gephi week (August 2022) has been extremely productive. It delivered bug fixes, new plugins, new directions for development but most of all it generated a renewed energy to participate and contribute. By funding the next edition, you contribute in a very concrete manner to making Gephi more stable in the long term.

Are you an academic?

2. Make use of your unique power: citations!

As a librarian, professor, student… a very impactful action in support of Gephi is to cite it in the bibliography of the documents your produce – in articles of course but in every publication really, including applications to projects and reports. These are the two papers referencing the tool you love:

> Bastian, M., Heymann, S., & Jacomy, M. (2009, March). Gephi: an open source software for exploring and manipulating networks. In Proceedings of the international AAAI conference on web and social media (Vol. 3, No. 1, pp. 361-362). link

> Jacomy, M., Venturini, T., Heymann, S., & Bastian, M. (2014). ForceAtlas2, a continuous graph layout algorithm for handy network visualization designed for the Gephi software. PloS one, 9(6), e98679. link

What to expect from it? Gephi has an excellent academic standing, with the original contribution cited more than 10,000 times and Gephi being mentioned in over 39,000 academic publications. Explicitly referencing Gephi in your publications contributes to making Gephi visible by making its impact measurable: it enhances its legitimacy and fosters adoption. And for you? Gephi having an established presence and growing reputation will make it easier to convince reviewer #2 that Gephi was indeed the right choice for this network analysis 😉

3. What about organizing an academic conference?

I think that Gephi has actually never been the central topic of an academic conference 🤔. Would you like to be the first? This could be about Gephi itself, or Gephi in relation with your scientific specialty (network analysis, social networks, organizational mapping, biological networks, computer science, forensics, etc.). Gephi is part of a broader ecosystem of software for the visual exploration of networks: Cytoscape, NodeXL, Graphext… come to mind. Organizing a conference around these would make total sense!

4. Grant writing!

At the suggestion of a Gephi user and academic: it would actually make sense to apply for funding to any local / international research funding agency, where Gephi would be listed as an essential resource in need of financing. Either directly or through the dedication of a research engineer / research designer / data scientist position working on Gephi, within the project team… these are just initial thoughts.

I personnally would love the idea. I could also connect you to academics who would be outstanding contributors to such a grant writing project in France or the European Union. Do get in touch! (my contacts are at the bottom of this post).

Do you ever write tutorials, how-tos, blog posts?

5. Write a simple intro about your experience using Gephi, help others discover it

A classic writer’s block about Gephi is that “I am not expert enough” to write about it. You are probably much more expert than you think (see next paragraph), but in any case you can explain and document the use case that you worked on with Gephi.

This is a very, very useful contribution to Gephi. It makes it discoverable, easier to understand and it showcases what it can do. Again, a common conception is that what we do is never “original enough” to be worth writing about. Absolutely not: each dataset or research question has interesting specificities. Help fellow users understand what you did and how you did it! And if the case is confidential, don’t let it stop you! Transform and abstract your case and showcase the principles you followed.

6. Shoot videos or shorts, any kind of social media postings are useful, too

I mentioned written pieces because that’s in my comfort zone. But videos, short or long, or posts on your favorite social media would be perfectly useful!

Examples

These are quite “high effort” examples, just to inspire you about the variety of formats. Do start with something smaller in scope!

Medium articles and tutorials by Veronica Espinoza or Ifeanyi Idiaye
A 20 minutes youtube video by Martin Granjean
A personal website with Gephi tutorials by myself
A company website hosting a blog, with a post dedicated to Gephi by OrgMapper

What to expect from it?

You gain the warm glow of knowing that you helped users discover what is possible with Gephi. Not interested in warm feelings? Then do it for the SEO, as Gephi is at the cross-road of network analysis, data science and data visualization: all SEO boxes checked at once.

Are you a beginner or moderately experienced with Gephi?

7. Help translate Gephi in your language!

Gephi is available in 22 languages, which is a good start but we can do better to bring the software to many other linguistic communities! Also, not all of the current 22 languages are translated at 100%. What you can do is participate in the translation! It all happens online, here.

Even if the interface looks intimidating at first, do register and get a start! And as always, don’t hesitate to request help on the Gephi Facebook group 🙂

8. Chat and contribute to the Gephi group on Facebook!

Yes, Facebook is really not anyone’s cup of tea. Discord, LinkedIn, Slack, a WordPress forum… all these would be preferable in some way and yet ten times less used than the group on Facebook. So we stay there for the moment.

The Gephi Facebook group has close to 10,000 members and is a very welcoming and friendly community. Join, post and read! Stuck in any way? Want to showcase a result? Definitely the place to post about it. And if you see anyone requesting assistance, which happens several times per week actually, have a look and it might well be something you have the answer to! Don’t be shy to offer your assistance, again my feeling is that we all tend to underestimate how helpful even a small piece of advice or assistance can be.

What to expect from it?

By giving back to the community, you are helping somebody who is a beginner just like you were some time ago. You help the community grow. Contributing to the Gephi Facebook group will also push you up on the learning curve by exposing you to a variety of cases, questions and solutions that you did not encounter in your usual flow of work with Gephi. A kind of learning platform!

Are you quite experienced with Gephi?

9. Join the Slack group for Gephi!

This Slack group exists in some form for many years and is used by the core developers of Gephi. I think it became more widely used at the occasion of the Gephi Week for 2022.

It is different from the Facebook group in the sense that it is a channel with a lower frequency of postings, with bursts of discussions around organizing and developing Gephi, rather than users helping other users. So it is quite exciting because you can see “Gephi in the making” but to remain productive, it should remain concentrated on that – steering and pushing Gephi forward, not really discussing how to use filters 😉

If you feel that you could contribute to this kind of discussions, do join here. You are not absolutely certain? Do join and be a listener for the first weeks, and you’ll see whether you want to be part of the discussions or not.

What to expect from it?

Well, that is super interesting to get close to the core of the Gephi app and community! This is the place where you could learn about the things brewing for the next months, and suggest contributions you can make: in skills, time, money, credit, etc.

I would like to emphasize that on this channel the most important are contributions (things you can do), not suggestions (things others should do…). The entire group of Gephi core contributors are pretty overwhelmed already, let’s give them some help, not a wishlist! 🙂

Are you a consultant / free-lancer / slasher?

10. Organize trainings and workshops!

It is not always super clear that Gephi as a topic and as an asset is for everyone – it doesn’t have to be contained to the gephi.org website or in the Gephi software. You can develop a free or commercial and / or for-profit activity about Gephi. One obvious activity would be training sessions or workshops about Gephi, or any consulting activity in a given sector, leveraging Gephi. Maybe that when this gets clarified, we’ll see a broader offer for trainings in Gephi?

What to expect from it?

Designing a training or workshop about Gephi is always a great occasion to re-learn what had become habitual. Besides the revenues you will generate from it, it will also establish your credentials in the domain.

Are you an indie developer, a startup or a larger company with resources for R&D?

11. Develop the ecosystem around Gephi!

Gephi provides hooks of an outstanding quality, that make it super convenient to develop your projects with a strong base:

the Gephi Toolkit is a standalone Java library that provides all the goodness of Gephi in of your projects, out of the box, with plenty of documentation
the gexf network format, which the Gephi team developed, provides a rich description of your networks – attributes, visual features and dynamic dimension as needed
the Gephi graphstore is the low level, standalone graph engine that powers Gephi and you could use it in your own projects too!
Gephi lite, a web-based version of Gephi for interactive visualizations in the browser – read about it in the Gephi blog.

What to expect from it?

Using these Gephi assets in your projects will save you time, not reinventing the wheel of a network app that includes the graph itself but also the algorithms, layouts, filters, management of attributes, I/O machinery etc. that you will also need pretty quickly. By doing so, you serve Gephi as you will naturally get involved in pushing Gephi and its various assets forward.

Are you a developer with significant experience?

It is on purpose that I kept this item for the end of the list. Indeed, we often assume that if we can’t code, we can’t contribute to Gephi. The 11 ways to contribute to Gephi listed just before have changed your outlook, I hope. Gephi really needs these 11 first types of contributions!

As a senior developer (or better said: not a full beginner in Java), you can also contribute to Gephi in several ways:

12. Java developer: shine!

Everybody has their own learning path, here is one:

one way to get acquainted with Gephi is to play with the Gephi Toolkit, which is the Gephi headless library for Java. It will give you a sense of how the API is structured, with a strong modular architecture and some not-so-common design patterns (not familiar with SPIs? You will be served! 😀).
then you might be interested in developping a plugin, which is another steep learning curve but very rewarding because, upon publication, your plugin becomes available to the entire Gephi user base (you can also choose to keep it private, of course).
in the course of using the Gephi toolkit or developing a plugin, you might open issues on Github. And depending on your expertise and grit, you will also look at the source code of Gephi and find things to solve. This is very welcome, of course.

13. Developer of desktop apps / Rich Client Applications

Gephi is built on top of the Apache NetBeans Platform, which is the Rich Client Application of the NetBeans IDE. If you have a strong interest in NetBeans / RCA / desktop applications / or the intrincaties of targetting a desktop app specifically for Windows of MacOS, you could make contributions of critical importance.

14. OpenGL for Java

I might be sloppy here as I have close to zero knowledge of the domain, but the visualization engine of Gephi is using OpenGL and that is of course quite a tricky aspect. I don’t have the details but Gephi is in the middle of a major upgrade of the underlying technologies for this OpenGL stuff, so if you or your organization is knowledgeable about this subject, you could also make essential contributions.

What to expect from it?

Gephi is led by developers who are first-class in their trade. Did you know that Gephi won a Duke Award back in the days? Contributing to this open source project would be a great learning experience for everyone involved and would speed up the delivery of key features. Gephi is also an open and free software: if you personally care about contributing to a FOSS, Gephi is a perfect choice ❤️.

In the end

If you’d like to contribute to Gephi in any of the ways listed above, a great place to initiate a discussion would be the Gephi Facebook group. I’d also love to get in touch! Just to discuss, give suggestions and point to the right person or resource. Don’t hesitate! I am Clement Levallois and my email is clement.levallois at gephi dot org.

6 February 2016 by Mathieu Bastian

A close look at the Gephi user community

Last December we asked Gephi users to participate in a survey. The survey’s main objective was to better understand who users are and what kind of projects they work on. One important dimension we wanted to explore was the diversity of the user community. Through the projects we’ve seen in research and on the web we knew that Gephi users were diverse, but we wanted to quantify it. Ultimately, we aim to make the tool better so it supports users’ needs, but this is a process that requires first a good understanding of who the audience is and what are their objectives. Below we summarized our findings about the profile of users, the types of networks they work with and finally useful usage statistics the community can reflect on.

Profile

The largest share of Gephi users work in academia. The project started in the academic sphere from where it has spread into business, artistic and non-profits domains as well. Working at a profit organization is the second most common occupation, which confirms that network analysis is no longer reserved to scientists.

Q12. What is your occupation? n=285; multiple choice

Given that the largest group of users works in academia, it is not surprising that the most common title among Gephi users is a researcher.

Q14. What is your title? n=285; multiple choice

The user community is also widely spread around the world. Users from 46 different countries participated in this study. This confirms the importance of localization for as many languages as possible (Gephi currently supports eight). While many countries were represented by only a handful number of participants in the study, large concentration of users is, as expected, in the US (23%) and in France (15%). Significant presence in France is predetermined by Gephi’s presence in universities and businesses within which Gephi was originally founded.

Networks

Social networks are by far the most commonly analyzed type of networks when using Gephi. 70% say that they typically analyze social networks when using Gephi. Social media and semantic network analysis are also common and typically analyzed by 46% and 43%, respectively. The rest of the networks are less common with ecological network analyzed by about 5% of users.

Despite SNA (Social Network Analysis) being the dominant use there is a large variety of other use as well. That said, networks can be analyzed only if the data are accessible and we (the community) still have work to do to ease network collection and formatting.

We always wondered if given occupations are more likely to work with specific types of networks. Based on this study, some differences exist, but they are not as prominent as we have expected. We found that people working at profit organizations are more likely to use Gephi to analyze business and financial networks. While in total 24% use Gephi to analyze business network, it is 44% among those who work in a profit organization compared to only 12% among those who do not work in a profit company. Differences for other types of networks were not conclusive.

Q5. What type(s) of network do you typically analyze using Gephi? n=285; multiple choice

Gephi users commonly deal with a wide range of network sizes. Although the typical network has between 100 to 10K nodes, every size from <100 nodes to 1M nodes represent at least 10% of users. In total that is more than 5 orders of magnitude difference in data size, and without taking edges in consideration!

Q6. What is/are the graph size(s) you deal with when working with Gephi? n=285; multiple choice
Q7. And what is the TYPICAL size of a graph that you manipulate with Gephi? n=285; single choice

While more than half of Gephi users have never used Gephi to analyse dynamic networks, the vast majority of the community is likely to use it in the future. This confirms the importance of the set of features related to dynamic networks that has long been one of Gephi’s primary focus.

Q8. Have you ever used Gephi to work with dynamic networks (networks over time)? n=285; single choice

Q9. How likely are you to use Gephi to analyze dynamic networks (networks over time) in the future? n=285; single choice

Usage

Both online and offline sources are important touch points through which people learn about Gephi for the first time. While web search is the most common way how people find Gephi, word of mouth remains an important channel and is not to be underestimated.

Q2. How did you first learn about Gephi? n=285, single choice

The community is very diverse when it comes to usage frequency which suggests that Gephi users are likely to have diverse needs. Occasional users are likely to have different expectations from a software than regular users. About one third uses Gephi at least once a week which confirms that there is a relatively large base of heavy users who use Gephi regularly.

Q3. On average, how often do you use Gephi? n=285; single choice

Online tutorials and online forums are key sources for users to learn about Gephi. This confirms the importance of creating and updating online tutorials. It also suggests that the community is well engaged to be able to provide answers one another on online forums and groups.

Q4. What source(s) have you used/are you using to learn how to use Gephi? n=285, multiple choice

Conclusion

This survey is a first, yet important step in understanding the Gephi user community at large. It also gives a general overview of the network visualization and analytics field and we hope this can be useful for others as well. But for us – the Gephi leadership team – this will help us in our future community management efforts. It will also help design a better tool in the future as we better understand its user community.

In addition, talking about what kinds of projects users work on also helps shape the understanding of what network analytics is used for, and ultimately bring more people to the community. In the near future we want to double-down on this topic and start a series of articles highlighting the most interesting projects. Many of the respondents indicated their willingness to share what they have worked on so there’s already plenty to choose from.

Finally, to reflect on the diversity of users we believe it simply reflects that networks are everywhere. Analyzing networks bring insights and answers to many different problems.

Appendix

Survey was conducted among Gephi users community. While the results provide a unique view into the Gephi community it is important to clarify that they are not meant to be representative of the entire community world wide.
The survey invitations were distributed throughout the week of Dec 1st 2015 via email, Twitter and Facebook
Final data set contains responses collected between Dec 1st 2015 and Dec 23rd 2015
A total of 285 participants completed the survey

16 December 201516 December 2015 by Mathieu Bastian

Plugin development gets new tools and opens-up to the community

Since the introduction of the Gephi Marketplace and tools such as the Plugins Bootcamp we’ve seen more and more plugins being developed. Even developers with little experience with Java give it a try and succeed in creating their first plugin. We want developers to be productive and make it as easy as possible to get started with plugin development and find help along the way. As the release of the 0.9 version is near, it’s time to review our plan on that matter and upcoming improvements. Here’s the summary:

The gephi-plugins base repository (i.e. repository plugin developers fork) is now using Maven for building and is simpler. It contains only 4 files versus 890 for the Ant-based system.
All Gephi modules are published on Maven central, making it very easy to inspect and extend.
Introduction of a custom Maven plugin designed to facilitate plugin development.
The submission and review of plugins will be entirely based of GitHub, making it more scalable and transparent.
A new online portal for plugins is coming up with an easier edit experience and new features.

From Ant to Maven

Before diving into plugins, let’s first review what has changed on how Gephi is compiled, built and packaged – as this directly affects plugins as well. Since the Gephi 0.8.2 version we have migrated our build system from Ant to Maven. This is in line with what the Netbeans Platform (i.e. which Gephi is based on) community recommends. It already has increased the level of automation we’re capable of as a result. The main benefits are (compared to Ant):

Maven is great at dependencies management. It’s now very clear what version of what library Gephi depends on, making it simpler to integrate. Dependencies are also downloaded automatically instead of being checked in the codebase
Unlike the Ant-based system, it’s independent from Netbeans. This allows developers not using Netbeans to develop Gephi and produce a build entirely from the command-line.
Gephi modules can now be placed on Maven Central (i.e. global repository where Maven finds its dependencies). This allows plugins to automatically find the Gephi dependencies online, reducing the manual steps at each Gephi upgrade.

Build assistant

There are a few critical steps we want to help plugin developers with and as a result started the development of a custom Maven plugin. This new tool will work behind the scenes when developers build their plugin. No installation or configuration is needed as it comes already as dependency of the gephi-plugins module. It already addresses common pain points and hope to automate more and more of the steps in the future. This is what it can do as of today:

Plugin validation: The assistant reviews the plugin configuration and metadata at each build. This allows for instance to check if the plugin depends on the correct Gephi version or remind the developer to define an author or license in its configuration.
Run Gephi with plugins: A single command allows to run Gephi with the plugins pre-installed. This makes testing faster than ever when developing plugins.
New plugin generator: A step-by-step command-line tool that creates the correct folder structure and configuration to get started.

In the future, we want to rely on this build assistant to further automate the process and for instance do easy migration or code generation. For instance, you could ask to generate a Layout plugin code and configuration. Afterwards, all needed would be to fill in the blanks in the code.

A new way to review and submit plugins

As the number of plugins grows, it’s important to have a clear process how plugins are reviewed and updated. We also want this process to be transparent and open to the community. So far, the process was based on the submission of the plugin binaries with a manual review done by the team. This helped us get where we are today, but we want to get it to the next level and propose to entirely move this process to GitHub – using the pull-request mechanism. This has multiple advantages, listed below:

Reviewing new/updated plugins can scale because any developer can read the code and contribute to the pull requests.
Developers are already asked to fork the gephi-plugins repository so submitting the plugin via GitHub is a natural extension to it.
There’s a clear history of each version, comment and what code has changed from one version to another.
It makes it easier to test plugins and detect issues before the plugin is approved.

As part of this migration, we’ll no longer add plugins with closed source code but all existing plugins for Gephi 0.8.2 will remain available. For security and stability reasons, it’s essential that each plugin’s code can be inspected before approval. In order for this to work, all existing plugins not already on GitHub or not forking the gephi-plugins repository will need to migrate. For those already set up, the migration will be easier but Ant-based plugins will still need to migrate to Maven.

To summarize, this is what the new 4-steps process looks like for developers:

gephi-new-plugin-development-process

In the current submission process we ask for additional information such as description, author or license as well as allow the upload of images. Going forward with GitHub, all of these data will directly be defined in the plugin’s configuration making it easier to update.

A new home for plugins (again)

Plugins are currently available online from the Gephi Marketplace, where users could also reach people providing teachings and support. We have ideas on how to improve these community services and will be migrating them to a new architecture, starting with the plugins. We will tell you more about these changes in an upcoming post but for now our focus is on developing a new lightweight plugin portal that can directly be connected with the data source on GitHub.

Here is a preview of what it will look like for plugin pages:

new-plugin-frontend-preview

The content of this website will be automatically updated when plugins are published or updated. The way it works is with Travis CI (i.e. continuous integration platform) simply refreshing the JSON file after changes to the plugin repository on GitHub. Developers can even embed images and write the description in Markdown. This will remove entirely the need for plugin developers to login to the marketplace, update NBMs and metadata.

Migrating plugins

This new Maven-based repository along with the new submission process will be introduced with the Gephi 0.9 release. Let’s review what plugin developers need to know to bring their plugin to this new major version.

As with all major Gephi release, plugins compatibility needs to be evaluated as APIs may have changed. In fact, given this new version is based on an entirely redeveloped core it’s very likely code changes will be required. Hopefully, these changes will often be minor and actually simplify things (i.e less, more efficient code). Documentation will be published on these API changes and core developers will be available to answer questions as well.

Plugin developers will also get contacted regarding moving their code to GitHub with a step-by-step guide. We’re considering adding a migrate command to the new Gephi Maven plugin to facilitate the transition from Ant but that’s an unfunded project at the moment (if you’re interested contributing to that, please let us know). Stay tuned for details right after the release on the path to migration.

And again, thanks for all your hard work on bringing your ideas to life though new Gephi plugins!

2 November 2015 by Mathieu Bastian

Announcing Gephi 0.9 release date

Gephi 0.9

Gephi has an amazing community of passionate users and developers. In the past few years, they have been very dedicated creating tutorials, developing new plugins or helping out on GitHub. They also have been patiently waiting for a new Gephi release! Today we’re happy to share with you that the wait will come to an end December 20th with the release of Gephi 0.9 for Windows, MacOS X and Linux.

We’re very excited about this upcoming release and developers are hard at work to deliver its roadmap before the end of 2015. This release will resolve a serie of compatibility issues as well as improve features and performance.

Our vision for Gephi remains focused on a few fundamentals, which were already outlined in our Manifesto back in 2009. Gephi should be a software for everyone, powerful yet easy to learn. In many ways, we still have the impression that we’ve only scratched the surface and want to continue to focus on making each module of Gephi better. As part of this release, we’ve undertaken one of the most difficult project we’ve worked on and completely rewrote the core of Gephi. Although not very visible for the end-user, this brings new capabilities, better performance and a level of code quality we can be proud of. This ensure a very solid foundation for the future of this software and paves the way for a future 1.0 version.

Below is an overview of the new features and improvements the 0.9 version will bring.

Java and MacOS compatibility

This release will restore Gephi’s compatibility with the latest Java versions on all platforms. This will resolve issues our users encounter with Java 7 and 8. Compatibility issues with Mac OS will also be resolved and full support for Retina display screens added.

New redeveloped core

This release will improve performance and reliability by a large margin. The graph structure at Gephi’s core has been redeveloped from scratch and will bring multiple new features, better performance and lower memory consumption. On benchmarks, simple operations such as reading nodes or setting attributes see performance improvements ranging from 2X to 100X. This new core will make many operations in Gephi faster and push the envelope even further in large graphs exploration. Reducing memory usage has also been an area of focus and we have measured a 2X reduction compared to Gephi 0.8.2 on a medium-size graph.

New Appearance module

We’re introducing a new user module named Appearance designed to combine and replace Ranking and Partition modules. Appearance will group in one place all controls acting on the node or edge appearance. The partition capabilities will also greatly improve as part of this new module and a new palette selector is being added. In addition of the default palettes, we’re also adding a cool palette generator designed to find the optimal colors (i.e. partitions can be differentiated from each other). Moreover, it will be possible to “Auto-apply” partitions as well, which is a feature that was only available for Ranking so far.

Timestamp support

This 0.9 release adds a new way to represent networks over time: timestamps. So far, users could only represent time using intervals and that was cumbersome when the underlying network data was collected at fixed time intervals (e.g. one network per day). Starting with this release, Gephi will support both intervals and timestamps to represent evolving network topology and/or evolving attribute values.

GEXF 1.3 support

The GEXF format is also evolving to its 1.3 version. This version improves the support for graphs over time and introduces the ability to represent time using timestamps rather than intervals. In addition, it’s now possible to set a timestamp or an interval for the entire graph, allowing building collections of GEXF files where each represents a “slice”. This is a common request from the community and we hope this will greatly facilitate the exploration of longitudinal networks.

Multiple files import

With the 0.9 version users will be able to import multiple files in Gephi at the same time. Once the files have been read, two choices are offered, either to import each file into a separate workspace or merge them into the same workspace. The latter is a powerful option when used with dynamic graphs. Indeed, a collection of GEXF files representing the same network over time will be imported in Gephi in a single step.

Multi-graph support

Multi-graph example This release will bring support for multi-graphs, where multiple edges can exist between two nodes each with a different relationship. Users will be able to import, filter and run algorithms on these graphs but the support for visualizing these graphs will come in a further release.

New workspace selection UI

We’ve heard users’ feedback and the workspace selection user interface will be improved. The new interface will be a “tab-style” interface where each workspace is a tab and switching from one workspace to another only requires a single click. Tabs will be located at the top just under the perspective selection. The previous interface is located at the bottom right corner and will be entirely removed. Workspace Tabs

Gephi Toolkit release

A new release of the Gephi Toolkit, based on the 0.9 version will be made soon after December 20th.

Bug fixes

We’ve done a serious bug squash and already addressed many difficult issues, more to come until the release date.

Follow us on Twitter or join the Facebook group to get the latest news. If you want to know more about this upcoming release, or want to help out please send us a note.

15 April 20131 February 2015 by gephi

Google Summer of Code 2013

It’s a great news, Gephi has been accepted again for the Google Summer of Code for the 5th year! The program is the best way for students around the world to start contributing to an open-source project. Since 2009, each edition is a great success and dramatically boosted Gephi’s project development.

What is Gephi?

Networks are everywhere: email systems, financial transaction systems and gene-protein interaction networks are just a few examples. Gephi began as a university student project four years ago and has quickly become an open source software leader in the visualization and analysis of large networks. It is an important contribution to the ecosystem of tools used by researchers and big data analysts to explore and extract value from the deluge of relational data and disseminate a better understanding for people to think about a “connected” world.

Gephi is a “Photoshop” for graphs: designed to make data navigation and manipulation easy, it covers the entire process from data importing to aesthetics refinements and communication. Users interact with the visualization and manipulate structures, shapes and colors to reveal the properties of complex and messy data. The goal is to help data analysts make hypotheses and intuitively discover patterns or errors in large data collections.

Gephi’s project aims at providing the perfect tool to visualize and analyze networks. We focus on usability, performance and modularity:

Usability: Easy to install, an UI without scripts and real-time manipulation.
Performance: Visualization engine and data structures are built scalable. Supporting always-larger graphs is an endless challenge!
Modularity: Extensible software architecture, built on top of Netbeans Platform. Add plug-ins with ease.

Learn more about Gephi, watch Introducing Gephi 0.7, download and try it by following Quick Start Tutorial.

Gephi’s project is young, the growing community is composed of engineers and scientists involved in network science, datavis and complex networks.

List of ideas

List of ideas are availabe on our wiki. They cover various skills and level of difficulties:

* Completing Legend module – Complete the Legend module, which was started in last year GSoC.
* GraphStore benchmark and tuning – Optimize and tune GraphStore based on a serie of new well-defined benchmarks.

Please also propose your ideas on the forum. They will be considered and discussed by the community. Have a look at our long-term Roadmap.

Students, join the network

Students, apply now for Gephi proposals. Join us on the forum and fill in the questionnaire. Be careful, deadline for submitting proposals is May 3 (timeline)!

Hélder Suzuki, student for Gephi in 2009 and now software engineer at Google, wrote:
At Gephi students will have the opportunity to produce high impact work on a rapidly growing area and be noted for it.

View our previous Google Summer of Code projects here and read former students interviews.

Follow Gephi on Twitter

20 February 20133 February 2015 by guillaumegcs

A month of Gephi Marketplace

guillaume_old160 Computer Science & Engineering Graduate from the Compiègne University of Technology, Guillaume Ceccarelli has been Gephi’s SysAdmin since 2008 and Web Developer since 2012. When he’s not by day working in the financial world, he freelances and stays close to ongoing entrepreneurship ventures.

Four weeks ago, we launched the Gephi Marketplace.

Haven’t taken a look yet? Didn’t know it existed? Take a few minutes to check it out now! It’s right here, waiting for you.

Why the Gephi marketplace?

For a long time, we felt like we lacked a central point of access when it came to what everyone was doing to improve or build upon Gephi. On one hand, our forums allowed for discussions to happen but they didn’t really enable anyone to share their work easily or to find out about one another. On the other hand, the wiki as well as our main site, served more as official portals to spread the word or to explore knowledge around Gephi, but they didn’t seem like a good fit to showcase the work our community was doing.

A little while ago, we decided to fix that.

The spirit behind the marketplace is simple. When we started, our idea was:

To provide Gephi users with easy means to find and learn more about what the community was building for and around Gephi
To give creators and people working with Gephi a way to publish their work and make them known to the entire community, without the overhead of a complex and lengthy process

This meant creating the central point for Gephi Plugins and what we call Gephi Services, which eventually became the Gephi Marketplace.

Before the marketplace existed, plugins were submitted and downloaded through the old plugin center, which required authors and the Gephi staff to go through a tedious process, creating a lot of work and unnecessary frustration for everyone. In addition, the system didn’t allow authors to update their own plugin pages, or to submit a different plugin for different versions of the Gephi application, a feature which was long requested before we finally became in a position to deliver it to you.

A new world of plugins

Now, every plugin download, even from the Gephi Application itself go through the marketplace! It means that as soon as a plugin goes live on our new platform, it’s directly available to every Gephi user around the world. Even if you haven’t made a plugin yourself, chances are you’ve already used the marketplace without realizing it!

Speaking of around the world, here’s a geographic breakdown of Gephi plugin downloads within the past 30 days:

Isn’t it impressive? 1169 plugin downloads and every continent is represented! (ok, not every single one. Props to the first Gephi user who’ll download a plugin from Antartica!)

It makes us extremely proud to help and foster such a vibrant community of Gephi users around the world. Remember that this map is for the last 30 days alone!

Today, we have 38 plugins listed on the marketplace, and we’ve made sure you can post your creations as easily as possible. It takes no more than 5 minutes to first fill in the plugin upload form, and we usually get back to you within 24 hours, so you can make your work available to thousands in record time!

A world of services

As briefly mentioned before, we’re also listing Gephi Services on the marketplace.

Over the years, we’ve noticed that a community of professionals and enthusiasts started providing services to the community. We’ve seen people doing trainings on Gephi, others integrating Gephi into data analysis workflows, or even create studies using Gephi as their tool of choice. We thought it was about time these fine folks got easier to find!

Every service provided by the community, for free or with a fee, is welcome to be listed. We already have a few, and to be honest we would love to see more of them!

Listing the services you provide on the Gephi marketplace is easy, and like with listing plugins it’s completely free, regardless of what you choose to charge for your work. We’re not here to collect fees. We just want to help other people know about your work, and to help you easily be found and easily be reached.

Following the same simple form submission process you can use for plugins, you give us all the info on what you’ve got for the community, you click ‘upload’, we get back to you, and then you have yourself a listing!… Which you can then customize to your liking, and for which you can include every single bit of information you want, and even a great copy! So not only can you let everyone know about what it is that you do, but also how truly wonderful it is to work with you and your expertise. So?

And now back to you.

Any question? Feel free to comment below! We’ll be glad to help you get started. And if you’d like to be kept in the know of what’s newly getting posted on the Marketplace, the RSS feed is this way.

In the meantime, thank you for your continued trust and your use of Gephi as your Graph Exploration and Manipulation tool of choice! It is our humble pleasure to serve you all.

See you soon on the marketplace! 🙂

12 February 20133 February 2015 by gephi

rgexf: An R library to work with GEXF graph files

George Vega is an economist working at the Chilean Pension Supervisor and cofounder of nodoschile.org. His research interests are Statistical Computing, HPC, Complex Systems and Public Policy.

The first R library to work with GEXF files, rgexf allows both writing (exporting) and reading (importing) .gexf files.

Features:

Writing and reading GEXF files
Writing dynamic graphs
Writing graphs with attributes (boolean, numeric, char)
Writing graphs with VIZ attributes (color, size, shape)
Building GEXF graphs from scratch (node/edge by node/edge)

rgexf is written in such a way that it is not necessary to have knowledge about XML.

Some examples:

# Installing from CRAN and loading install.packages("rgexf", dependencies=TRUE) library(rgexf)
# Reading lesmiserables graph (and summarizing) lesmiserables <- read.gexf("http://gephi.org/datasets/LesMiserables.gexf") summary(lesmiserables)
# Building a GEXF class object (includes data frames of nodes/edges + # XML representation of it) from two two-column data.frames mygraph <- write.gexf(nodes=people, edges=relations)
# Exporting to some place print(mygraph, output="mygraph.gexf", replace=TRUE)
# Creating a GEXF object from scratch (and adding a node) mynewgraph <- new.gexf.graph() mynewgraph <- add.gexf.nodes(mynewgraph, id=1, label="George")
The source code plus more examples can be found on the project website.

For suggestions, bug reports or support (any) ask me through Twitter @gvegayon or just write me an email to george [dot] vega [at] nodoschile [dot] org

George Vega Yon

9 January 20133 February 2015 by gephi

Graph visualization meet-up in Paris

Meetup on graph visualization: join us the 24/01 in Paris

Neo4j, the leading graph database software, will be organizing a meetup on the visualization of graphs. It’s free, if you want to come you just have to register here.

Graph databases are a new way to store and access data by representing it as nodes and connections. It is particularly useful for dealing with highly connected data as social networks, recommendation engines, music discovery or anti-fraud systems do. Graph databases give data scientists exciting opportunities.

You will learn how to combine Neo4j and Gephi using the Neo4j plugin of Gephi. You will also discover Linkurious, a novel web-based application to explore graph data easily, which has been co-founded by Sébastien Heymann.

The workshop will be held in English and French.

Register on meetup.com

Date: 24th of January, from 7:30 PM to 10:15 PM
Place: Zenika office, 10 rue de Milan, Paris

21 November 20123 February 2015 by gephi

Talk on community management at Inria fOSSa 2012

The Gephi Consoritium will participate to the fourth edition of the fOSSa Conference taking place from December 4 to 6, 2012 in Lille (France).

The aim of the fOSSa (Free Open Source Academia Conference) is to reaffirm the underlying values of Open Source software: innovation & research in software development.

While the first edition aimed at providing valuable information on the Open Source model at large, the second edition focused specific key-aspects of FOSS such as tech innovation,upcoming issues & challenges in the open development context and how open activities, collaboration and knowledge sharing is beneficial to academia, education & industry. The third edition look at the future of Open Source (Eco system, Trends, new territories, etc).

The fourth edition will address in an open-minded style about:
– Digital Geographic Strategies & the Native Generation,
– FLOSS History with the movie: “Revolution OS” followed by a debate,
– Open Art, collaboration between art & science,
– Licenses in the real life: no lawyers speeches, only facts & return experience,
– Workshops to learn how to develop code for debian, gnome, apache, robotics ROS …
And, of course the usual fOSSa topics (Education & Community management).

At this occasion, Sébastien Heymann will make a presentation about Motivations in Free Software communities, 6th Dec at 2pm in the Community Management track.

“What marks the difference between fOSSa and other events is the air that you breath there. An event organized by passionate people, with passionate attendees as well … and great speakers. Every year you can get some presentations of greater international events in advance (I remember the year of Arduino, to give you an example).” — Gabriele Ruffatti — SpagoWorld Blog 2012.

fOSSa days are open to everyone and registration is free!
more information @ http://fossa.inria.fr

EDIT: slides of the presentation
http://fr.slideshare.net/slideshow/embed_code/15531802

Motivation in FLOSS communities from Sébastien