Abstract
GitHub is a popular source code hosting and development service that supports distributed teams working on large and small software projects, particularly open-source projects. According to Wikipedia, as of April 2017 GitHub supports more than 20 million users and more than 57 million repositories. In addition to version control and code updates functionalities, GitHub supports a wide range of communication options between users, including messaging, commenting, and wikis. GitHub thus has all markings of an online social network, but how does it compare to other social media such as Twitter or Facebook? Since GitHub supports messaging between users as well as “following” it seems the answer is pretty straightforward. And yet, messaging and following do not account for the bulk of activity in GitHub, which consists largely of user initiated repository “events” related to adding, editing, and fixing the code (as well as other artifacts, such as documentation and manuals). In this sense GitHub is quite unlike Twitter, where information flows rapidly between users by being passed along to others. What information flows in GitHub, besides the actual messaging? In this paper, we discuss preliminary findings that the GitHub community displays many of the characteristics of a social network.
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Acknowledgements
This work was supported by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) under Contract No. FA8650-18-C-7824. All statements of fact, opinion or conclusions contained herein are those of the authors and should not be construed as representing the official views or policies of AFRL, DARPA, or the U.S. Government.
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Strzalkowski, T., Harrison, T., Sa, N., Katsios, G., Khoja, E. (2019). GitHub as a Social Network. In: Ahram, T. (eds) Advances in Artificial Intelligence, Software and Systems Engineering. AHFE 2018. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol 787. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94229-2_37
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94229-2_37
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