# Activity-Based Analysis of Open Source Software Contributors: Roles and Dynamics

## TL;DR

This paper analyzes how open source software contributors assume various roles and how their activities and role dynamics can inform better tool design, based on data from 29 GitHub projects.

## Contribution

It introduces a methodology to identify contributor roles and their activity patterns, offering insights for designing more role-aware OSS tools.

## Key findings

- Identified six key contributor activities
- Defined four active and five supporting roles
- Revealed patterns in role changes over time

## Abstract

Contributors to open source software (OSS) communities assume diverse roles to take different responsibilities. One major limitation of the current OSS tools and platforms is that they provide a uniform user interface regardless of the activities performed by the various types of contributors. This paper serves as a non-trivial first step towards resolving this challenge by demonstrating a methodology and establishing knowledge to understand how the contributors' roles and their dynamics, reflected in the activities contributors perform, are exhibited in OSS communities. Based on an analysis of user action data from 29 GitHub projects, we extracted six activities that distinguished four Active roles and five Supporting roles of OSS contributors, as well as patterns in role changes. Through the lens of the Activity Theory, these findings provided rich design guidelines for OSS tools to support diverse contributor roles.