Analyzing the Open Science MOOC Twitter community - Open Science MOOC

As of lately, several friends of mine tried to convince me to resume writing and this was when I remembered that I apparently once thought so as well when creating this blog. One of those friends happened to be Jon Tennant, dinosaur whisperer from Brexit land and founder of the Open Science MOOC.

In case you have never heard of it, the Open Science MOOC is a free massive open online course hosted on Eliademy. It aims to equip students and researchers with the skills they need to excel in a modern research environment based on Open Science - that is, the broad adoption of good scientific practices as a fundamental and essential part of the research process. The Open MOOC brings together the efforts and resources of hundreds of researchers and practitioners who have all dedicated their time and experience to create a welcoming and supporting community platform.

Along with almost 700 Slack members, we are currently working on a new module on Open Access. While the other Open MOOC-ers are busy collecting resources and setting learning outcomes, I wanted to contribute with what I can do best (other than building dinosaur kits for children): Analyzing them. Because analyzing people is what you do when you like them, right? Is that just me? OK, fair enough.

After realizing that a) I could not get my hands on our Slack analytics due to the free plan and b) being inspired by Shirin Glander’s awesome blog post on characterizing her own Twitter followers, I decided to collect data on all friends and followers of the Open Science MOOC’s official Twitter account.

In this blog post, I am now going to analyze this data in order to answer the following questions:

1. Is there an overlap between the Open Science MOOC’s Twitter followers and friends? Who should be immediately unfollowed for not following back?*
2. Where are the Open Science MOOC’s twitter followers based? Is there any evidence for a geographically concentrated Open Science Twitter bubble?
3. What about diversity among the followers? Does the Open Science MOOC keep its promise of being an inclusive and diverse platform?
4. Who are the most influential and active followers? Could they potentially start a revolution, take over the Twitter community, and throw Jon off the Open Science throne?
5. What do the followers state in their own profile descriptions? Which institutions are they affiliated with? Which opinions do they express? And last but certainly not least: Do their own texts say anything meaningful about the interests and research activities of the Open Science Twitter MOOC-ers (spoiler alert: yes)?

*Just kidding, of course I skipped this part. But make sure to follow the Open Science MOOC, one never knows what the future might bring… Just kidding again.