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:

1. To provide Gephi users with easy means to find and learn more about what the community was building for and around Gephi
2. 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! 🙂