So I got a task to prepare a simple analysis on how useful, from sociometrical point of view, are Slack API methods (https://api.slack.com/methods). Yesterday I didn't even know that such thing as sociometry exists, and i still dont know how to evaluate any API using its methodology. Does anyone here ever got a similar task, or have any idea how to approach such analysis? What literature will be useful? I don't mean this analysis to be particularly long, but as for now I don't even know where to start.
Frankly, I am not an expert on sociometry , but here is how I would approach it:
I would assume the goal is to create a sociogramm depicting the relationships between all users on a Slack team using the API methods. So the question is how useful the API methods are to achieve that goal.
Slack does not have a "friends list", like Facebook, so you have to come up with your own approach on how to identify relationships on Slack. Slack is a messaging system, so it makes sense to define it based on who is communicating with whom.
Lets define users to have a relationships if they are
Now to assess the effectiveness of the API methods. The basic approach would be to retrieve the messages of a public channel with channels.history (or im.history for direct messages, groups.history for for private channel and mpim.history for direct messaging channels with multiple participants) for a given time period. In addition you can retrieve the members of a channel with channels.info (or their pendants for the other channel types). Then you would parse all retrieved messages and the member list of a channel to identify the relationship and calculate the sociagram.
However, Slack will only allow users to access channels, that they are members of. That includes access through the API and that includes users with the role admin and owner.
So its not possible to see all direct messages, groups chats and private channel of a Slack team through the API and we would therefore need to limit the approach to public channels and some private channel. Depending on where most of the conversation is happening on a specific Slack team and which private channels our slack user is a member of this could significantly limit the ability to calculate a complete sociogram.
In summary you can use the API methods to calculate a sociogram for your Slack team based on which users users are communicating with each other. But that analysis will not be 100% complete, since its not possible to access all private communication on a Slack team though the API. The calculated sociogram might still be useful though, if the Slack user doing the calculation has access to all relevant private channels.