Coding Together at Scale: GitHub as a Collaborative Social Network

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Citation: Antonio Lima, Luca Rossi, Mirco Musolesi (2014) Coding Together at Scale: GitHub as a Collaborative Social Network.
arXiv (preprint): arXiv:1407.2535
Internet Archive Scholar (search for fulltext): Coding Together at Scale: GitHub as a Collaborative Social Network
Wikidata (metadata): Q109109373
Download: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1407.2535.pdf
Tagged: github (RSS)

Summary

Claims to be first in-depth quantitative analysis of GitHub. Contributions:

  • Show contributors, watchers per project and followers per user show a power law like shape
  • Low reciprocity of social ties relative to other social networks
  • Collaboration on forks happen on a limited number of key projects
  • Very active users do not necessarily have a large number of followers
  • Users tend to interact with other users they are geographically close to

Data is from GitHub Archive [as of 2021 GHArchive] collection of GitHub events between March 11, 2012 and September 11, 2013.