In June 2012, I was invited by Javier Toret to an initial gather between researchers and activists for starting an ambitious study of the #15M movement (aka. Indignados movement or #spanishrevolution). That meeting evolved into a interdisciplinary research group known as @datAnalysis15M. One year after (while we also organized workshops, lectures and hackatons), we release our first production:
My collaboration consists of the analysis of the diffusion networks based on retweets in key intervals of time during the first year of the movement. The results show different patterns of interaction in comparison with previous studies about political parties. Specifically, we observe a large amount of interactions between different (geographical and ideological) communities of the movement while politicians only propagate messages generated by their own sub-network. We also emphasize the importance of the fact that the most relevant users in the #15M network are collective profiles and selected users (meritocratic model) while the most central users in political parties are the ones who were previously designed as leaders in the offline world (hierarchical model).
Shared material (licensed under CC-by-sa and GFDL):
- Full text (in Spanish)
- Summary of the study (in English, in Spanish)
- Slides (in English, in Spanish)
- Twitter datasets
Pablo Aragón 
3 thoughts on “Technopolitics: the potential of connected multitudes”