Sense Stack is an innovative suite of open source software developed, customized and maintained by Edgeryders.

SenseStack is integrated with complete access to the Edgeryders Academy, with online courses about digital ethnography with Open Ethnographer, semantic social network analysis with Graphryder and Community Building & Management.

SenseStack is the toolkit for starting a house in the OpenVillage ecosystem, and it will play a key role in the ignition (startup) period of a new house. Courses already available in the platform are taught by community members that will be responsible also for webinars and live workshops.

Open Ethnographer is an open source tool for Qualitative Data Analysis (QDA), which is a way to systematize and understand long chunks of text and to make sense out of it.

Open Ethnographer is used for “coding” or tagging the content of online conversations, with awareness of how each tag fits into the social network of interactions. It is a simple to use and intuitive tool that is key to other and more rich visualizations (ie through the use of Graphryder).

Ethnography as always been a solitary science, Open Ethnographer is a new and scalable system that allows digital ethnography at an unprecedented scale, and because the goal of Ethnography is to understand communities make meaning and create culture, from the point of view of the community itself, OE is one of the first step to harness collective intelligence at work.

It’s developed for and by ethnographers, but can easily be taught to any community manager to keep track of an online conversation at depth.

EdgeSense is a dashboard that allows community administrator to understand their community. It’s organized around a graphical representation of the community where nodes represents users and edges represent interactions.

EdgeSense helps you take decision on your community management. For example is it possible to highlight or hide the role of moderators, and understand how much the community is self-sustainable or need a push from the center.

Another possible analysis is based on the subcommunities that are active in and how dense the networks are between subcommunities. Analysis of nodes then help you understand how much your community members are active and engaged in the conversation, which is key to understand different roles or project groups that could emerge during the period of activity.

Graphryder is a dashboard tool that allow us to analyze the conversations that are happening in the community through reading of ethnographic data. Graphryder is based on innovative academic research which has led to publication in scientific journals.

A dashboard represents conversations, and the fieldnotes made by researchers thereon, in network form. We call these networks semantic social networks, as they incorporate information on social interaction and their meaning. They encode a map of the associations between key concepts as perceived by informants as a group.

Graphryder is a very useful tool for insight into your community because it maps out a graph of the view of the community about sets of topics, and it can lead to unexpected solutions or original point of views. Graphryder is what helps you navigate conversations at scale and gain insights.

Dreams is the Edgeryders version of the open source tool Dreams for co-creating projects in an easy and transparent manner with the rest of a community. It’s also the tool that will keep track of budgeting and fund applications. Dreams has been used by participatory communities since 2015, and the Edgeryders version DreamSense is under development.