Coding Together at Scale: GitHub as a Collaborative Social Network
Antonio Lima, Luca Rossi, Mirco Musolesi

TL;DR
This paper provides a comprehensive quantitative analysis of GitHub as a social and collaborative platform, examining user interactions, collaboration patterns, and geographic influences over 18 months.
Contribution
It is the first large-scale study analyzing the complex interactions and social network structure of GitHub using extensive event logs.
Findings
User interactions follow power-law distributions.
Low reciprocity in social ties among users.
Active users do not always have many followers.
Abstract
GitHub is the most popular repository for open source code. It has more than 3.5 million users, as the company declared in April 2013, and more than 10 million repositories, as of December 2013. It has a publicly accessible API and, since March 2012, it also publishes a stream of all the events occurring on public projects. Interactions among GitHub users are of a complex nature and take place in different forms. Developers create and fork repositories, push code, approve code pushed by others, bookmark their favorite projects and follow other developers to keep track of their activities. In this paper we present a characterization of GitHub, as both a social network and a collaborative platform. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first quantitative study about the interactions happening on GitHub. We analyze the logs from the service over 18 months (between March 11, 2012 and…
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