Coding Together at Scale: GitHub as a Collaborative Social Network

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.