Colleague connections within the Government of Canada’s social networking platform, GCconnex

A dataset detailing the colleague connections within the Government of Canada’s social networking platform, GCconnex. The data has been anonymized, where each user on GCconnex is denoted by a random number. The dataset contains every user on GCconnex who has added a ‘colleague’ on the network, (colleague is synonymous with adding a friend on Facebook). When two users on GCconnex add each other as a colleague, a link is drawn between them, demonstrating their connection. This link is known in the data as an edge. Each user who has made a colleague on GCconnex is a node. The date the user created their account, and the department of each user is recorded for each node. The date a colleague connection was made is recorded with the edge.

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The department of each user on GCconnex is determined either by the user indicating their current department, or, if the user does not indicate their department, by using the suffix of the user’s email. Recently, the Government of Canada has commenced an initiative to give select departments the email suffix of @canada.ca. If a GCconnex user has the Canada.ca email suffix, and does not indicate their department, we cannot accurately determine their department. Additionally, if there is a typo in the email address from the user, it becomes difficult to efficiently determine their department if they do not indicate their department themselves. For these reasons, there is a small amount of users that are not given a department specification, but have their department given as Canada.ca, or as their email suffix.