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Twitter is widely used by software developers. But how effective are tweets at promoting open source projects? How could one use Twitter to increase a project’s popularity or attract new contributors? In this paper we report on a mixed-methods empirical study of 44,544 tweets containing links to 2,370 open-source GitHub repositories, looking for evidence of causal effects of these tweets on the projects attracting new GitHub stars and contributors, as well as characterizing the high-impact tweets, the people likely being attracted by them, and how they differ from contributors attracted otherwise. Among others, we find that tweets have a statistically significant and practically sizable effect on obtaining new stars and a small average effect on attracting new contributors. The popularity, content of the tweet, as well as the identity of tweet authors all affect the scale of the attraction effect. In addition, our qualitative analysis suggests that forming an active Twitter community for an open source project plays an important role in attracting new committers via tweets. We also report that developers who are new to GitHub or have a long history of Twitter usage but few tweets posted are most likely to be attracted as contributors to the repositories mentioned by tweets. Our work contributes to the literature on open source sustainability.
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Need for Tweet: How Open Source Developers Talk About Their GitHub Work on Twitter.
Social media, especially Twitter, has always been a part of the professional lives of software developers, with prior work reporting on a diversity of usage scenarios, including sharing information, staying current, and promoting one’s work. However, previous studies of Twitter use by software developers typically lack information about activities of the study subjects (and their outcomes) on other platforms. To enable such future research, in this paper we propose a computational approach to cross-link users across Twitter and GitHub, revealing (at least) 70,427 users active on both. As a preliminary analysis of this dataset, we report on a case study of 786 tweets by open-source developers about GitHub work, combining automatic characterization of tweet authors in terms of their relationship to the GitHub items linked in their tweets with qualitative analysis of the tweet contents. We find that different developer roles tend to have different tweeting behaviors, with repository owners being perhaps the most distinctive group compared to other project contributors and followers. We also note a sizeable group of people who follow others on GitHub and tweet about these people’s work, but do not otherwise contribute to those open-source projects. Our results and public dataset open up multiple future research directions.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1901311
- PAR ID:
- 10190353
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Mining Software Repositories
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3379597.3387466
