The European TEL Projects Community from a Social Network Analysis Perspective

Abstract. In this paper we draw a community landscape of European Commission-funded TEL projects and organizations in the 6th and 7th Framework Programmes and eContentplus. The project metadata were crawled from the web and maintained as part of the TEL Mediabase, a large collection of data obtained from different web sources including blogs, bibliographies, and project fact sheets. We apply social network analysis and impact analysis on the project consortium progression graph and on the organizational collaboration graph to identify the most central TEL projects and organizations. The key findings are that networks of excellence and integrated projects have the strongest impact on the project network; that eContentplus was a funding bridge between FP6 and FP7; and that the tightly knit collaboration network may inhibit the assimilation of new organizations and ideas into the TEL community.