You can see here a fantastic map of the Ubuntu community team and how they communicate with each other on IRC to organise the events, talk about problems and socialise.
I’ve developed a method for processing irc logs and generating communication graphs. It would be fairly easy to develop a similar graph for any other irc channel to see relationships.
There are some improvements still to be made in the visualisation, but I’m happy with this so far. Enough to put it to one side and work on other things.