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This article presents a systematic analysis of the patterns of behavior of individuals as well as groups observed in community-driven platforms for discussion like Reddit, where users usually exchange information and viewpoints on their…
Gender diversity in open source software development continues to be a topic of growing interest among researchers, practitioners, and organizations. To date, research has revealed disparities in participation between developers on the…
This paper studies community formation in OSS collaboration networks. While most current work examines the emergence of small-scale OSS projects, our approach draws on a large-scale historical dataset of 1.8 million GitHub users and their…
Swarming is a conspicuous behavioural trait observed in bird flocks, fish shoals, insect swarms and mammal herds. It is thought to improve collective awareness and offer protection from predators. Many current models involve the hypothesis…
Millions of users visit Stack Overflow regularly to ask community for answers to their programming questions. However, like many other platforms, Stack Overflow consistently struggles with low user retention and declining levels of user…
Source code repositories allow developers to manage multiple versions (or branches) of a software system. Pull-requests are used to modify a branch, and backporting is a regular activity used to port changes from a current development…
Studies over the past decade demonstrated that developers contributing to open source software systems tend to self-organize in "emerging" communities. This latent community structure has a significant impact on software quality. While…
The aerial flocking of birds, or murmurations, has fascinated observers while presenting many challenges to behavioral study and simulation. We examine how the periphery of murmurations remain well bounded and cohesive. We also investigate…
Broad topics in online platforms represent a type of meso-scale between individual user-defined communities and the whole platform; they typically consist of related communities that address different facets of a shared topic. Users often…
Open source projects depend on newcomers who stay, yet most leave after a single contribution. Contribution events such as Google Summer of Code, LFX Mentorship, Hacktoberfest, and 24 Pull Requests attract thousands of newcomers each year,…
Collective motion of bird flocks can be explained via the hypothesis of many wrongs, and/or, a structured leadership mechanism. In pigeons, previous studies have shown that there is a well-defined hierarchical structure and certain specific…
The global public sphere has changed dramatically over the past decades: a significant part of public discourse now takes place on algorithmically driven platforms owned by a handful of private companies. Despite its growing importance,…
Developer contribution guidelines are used in social coding sites like GitHub to explain and shape the process a project expects contributors to follow. They set standards for all participants and "save time and hassle caused by improperly…
The maintenance and evolution of Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) projects demand the constant attraction of core developers. In this paper, we report the results of a survey with 52 developers, who recently became core contributors…
When inspiring software developers to contribute to open source software, the act is often referenced as an opportunity to build tools to support the developer community. However, that is not the only charge that propels contributions --…
When a group of people strives to understand new information, struggle ensues as various ideas compete for attention. Steep learning curves are surmounted as teams learn together. To understand how these team dynamics play out in software…
As collaborative coding environments make it easier to contribute to software projects, the number of developers involved in these projects keeps increasing. This increase makes it more difficult for code reviewers to deal with buggy…
Open-source developers, particularly the elite developers, maintain a diverse portfolio of contributing activities. They do not only commit source code but also spend a significant amount of effort on other communicative, organizational,…
Popular and large contemporary open-source projects now embrace a diverse set of documentation for communication channels. Examples include contribution guidelines (i.e., commit message guidelines, coding rules, submission guidelines), code…
When programmers look for how to achieve certain programming tasks, Stack Overflow is a popular destination in search engine results. Over the years, Stack Overflow has accumulated an impressive knowledge base of snippets of code that are…