Building the Collaboration Graph of Open-Source Software Ecosystem

TL;DR

This paper presents an interactive visualization of the open-source software collaboration graph, highlighting developer-project relationships and addressing scalability challenges with filtering and hierarchical approaches.

Contribution

It introduces a scalable method for visualizing large-scale open-source collaboration graphs using filtering and plans for hierarchical visualization techniques.

Findings

Filtered large graphs for visualization feasibility

Published interactive visualizations of developer-project relationships

Proposed hierarchical approaches for full-scale visualization

Abstract

The Open-Source Software community has become the center of attention for many researchers, who are investigating various aspects of collaboration in this extremely large ecosystem. Due to its size, it is difficult to grasp whether or not it has structure, and if so, what it may be. Our hackathon project aims to facilitate the understanding of the developer collaboration structure and relationships among projects based on the bi-graph of what projects developers contribute to by providing an interactive collaboration graph of this ecosystem, using the data obtained from World of Code infrastructure. Our attempts to visualize the entirety of projects and developers were stymied by the inability of the layout and visualization tools to process the exceedingly large scale of the full graph. We used WoC to filter the nodes (developers and projects) and edges (developer contributions to a project) to reduce the scale of the graph that made it amenable to an interactive visualization and published the resulting visualizations. We plan to apply hierarchical approaches to be able to incorporate the entire data in the interactive visualizations and also to evaluate the utility of such visualizations for several tasks.