The Role of Emotions in Contributors Activity: A Case Study on the GENTOO Community

TL;DR

This study investigates how emotions influence contributor activity in the Gentoo OSS community, using sentiment analysis and activity data to predict contributor turnover and understand emotional impacts on participation.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach combining sentiment analysis with activity data to predict contributor attrition in open source communities.

Findings

Contributors tend to become inactive after expressing strong emotions.

Deviations in emotional patterns correlate with increased risk of leaving.

A Bayesian classifier effectively predicts contributor turnover.

Abstract

We analyse the relation between the emotions and the activity of contributors in the Open Source Software project Gentoo. Our case study builds on extensive data sets from the project's bug tracking platform Bugzilla, to quantify the activity of contributors, and its mail archives, to quantify the emotions of contributors by means of sentiment analysis. The Gentoo project is known for a period of centralization within its bug triaging community. This was followed by considerable changes in community organization and performance after the sudden retirement of the central contributor. We analyse how this event correlates with the negative emotions, both in bilateral email discussions with the central contributor, and at the level of the whole community of contributors. We then extend our study to consider the activity patterns on Gentoo contributors in general. We find that contributors are more likely to become inactive when they express strong positive or negative emotions in the bug tracker, or when they deviate from the expected value of emotions in the mailing list. We use these insights to develop a Bayesian classifier that detects the risk of contributors leaving the project. Our analysis opens new perspectives for measuring online contributor motivation by means of sentiment analysis and for real-time predictions of contributor turnover in Open Source Software projects.