The OCEAN mailing list data set: Network analysis spanning mailing lists and code repositories

TL;DR

This paper presents a standardized, large-scale dataset of mailing list communications for open source projects, combining social and technical data to facilitate sociotechnical analysis and theory testing.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive mailing list dataset for multiple open source communities, merging social and technical data, and demonstrates its utility through analysis of the Python community.

Findings

33% of GitHub contributors identified in mailing lists

Correlation between social messaging valence and collaboration network structure

Dataset enables testing organizational science theories in open source

Abstract

Communication surrounding the development of an open source project largely occurs outside the software repository itself. Historically, large communities often used a collection of mailing lists to discuss the different aspects of their projects. Multimodal tool use, with software development and communication happening on different channels, complicates the study of open source projects as a sociotechnical system. Here, we combine and standardize mailing lists of the Python community, resulting in 954,287 messages from 1995 to the present. We share all scraping and cleaning code to facilitate reproduction of this work, as well as smaller datasets for the Golang (122,721 messages), Angular (20,041 messages) and Node.js (12,514 messages) communities. To showcase the usefulness of these data, we focus on the CPython repository and merge the technical layer (which GitHub account works on what file and with whom) with the social layer (messages from unique email addresses) by identifying 33% of GitHub contributors in the mailing list data. We then explore correlations between the valence of social messaging and the structure of the collaboration network. We discuss how these data provide a laboratory to test theories from standard organizational science in large open source projects.