TY - GEN
T1 - Understanding project dissemination on a social coding site
AU - Jiang, Jing
AU - Zhang, Li
AU - Li, Lei
PY - 2013
Y1 - 2013
N2 - Popular social coding sites like GitHub and BitBucket are changing software development. Users follow some interesting developers, listen to their activities and find new projects. Social relationships between users are utilized to disseminate projects, attract contributors and increase the popularity. A deep understanding of project dissemination on social coding sites can provide important insights into questions of project diffusion characteristics and into the improvement of the popularity. In this paper, we seek a deeper understanding of project dissemination in GitHub. We collect 2,665 projects and 272,874 events. Moreover, we crawl 747,107 developers and 2,234,845 social links to construct social graphs. We analyze topological characteristics and reciprocity of social graphs. We then study the speed and the range of project dissemination, and the role of social links. Our main observations are: (1) Social relationships are not reciprocal. (2) The popularity increases gradually for a long time. (3) Projects spread to users far away from their creators. (4) Social links play a notable role of project dissemination. These results can be leveraged to increase the popularity. Specifically, we suggest that project owners should (1) encourage experienced developers to choose some promising new developers, follow them in return and provide guidance. (2) promote projects for a long time. (3) advertise projects to a wide range of developers. (4) fully utilize social relationships to advertise projects and attract contributors.
AB - Popular social coding sites like GitHub and BitBucket are changing software development. Users follow some interesting developers, listen to their activities and find new projects. Social relationships between users are utilized to disseminate projects, attract contributors and increase the popularity. A deep understanding of project dissemination on social coding sites can provide important insights into questions of project diffusion characteristics and into the improvement of the popularity. In this paper, we seek a deeper understanding of project dissemination in GitHub. We collect 2,665 projects and 272,874 events. Moreover, we crawl 747,107 developers and 2,234,845 social links to construct social graphs. We analyze topological characteristics and reciprocity of social graphs. We then study the speed and the range of project dissemination, and the role of social links. Our main observations are: (1) Social relationships are not reciprocal. (2) The popularity increases gradually for a long time. (3) Projects spread to users far away from their creators. (4) Social links play a notable role of project dissemination. These results can be leveraged to increase the popularity. Specifically, we suggest that project owners should (1) encourage experienced developers to choose some promising new developers, follow them in return and provide guidance. (2) promote projects for a long time. (3) advertise projects to a wide range of developers. (4) fully utilize social relationships to advertise projects and attract contributors.
UR - https://www.scopus.com/pages/publications/84893409608
U2 - 10.1109/WCRE.2013.6671288
DO - 10.1109/WCRE.2013.6671288
M3 - 会议稿件
AN - SCOPUS:84893409608
SN - 9781479929313
T3 - Proceedings - Working Conference on Reverse Engineering, WCRE
SP - 132
EP - 141
BT - Proceedings - 20th Working Conference on Reverse Engineering, WCRE 2013
PB - IEEE Computer Society
T2 - 20th Working Conference on Reverse Engineering, WCRE 2013
Y2 - 14 October 2013 through 17 October 2013
ER -