Jyoti Sheoran, Kelly Blincoe, Eirini Kalliamvakou, D. Damian, J. Ell
{"title":"Understanding \"watchers\" on GitHub","authors":"Jyoti Sheoran, Kelly Blincoe, Eirini Kalliamvakou, D. Damian, J. Ell","doi":"10.1145/2597073.2597114","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"Users on GitHub can watch repositories to receive notifications about project activity. This introduces a new type of passive project membership. In this paper, we investigate the behavior of watchers and their contribution to the projects they watch. We find that a subset of project watchers begin contributing to the project and those contributors account for a significant percentage of contributors on the project. As contributors, watchers are more confident and contribute over a longer period of time in a more varied way than other contributors. This is likely attributable to the knowledge gained through project notifications.","PeriodicalId":6621,"journal":{"name":"2016 IEEE/ACM 13th Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR)","volume":"483 1","pages":"336-339"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0000,"publicationDate":"2014-05-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"58","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"2016 IEEE/ACM 13th Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR)","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1145/2597073.2597114","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"","JCRName":"","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 58
Abstract
Users on GitHub can watch repositories to receive notifications about project activity. This introduces a new type of passive project membership. In this paper, we investigate the behavior of watchers and their contribution to the projects they watch. We find that a subset of project watchers begin contributing to the project and those contributors account for a significant percentage of contributors on the project. As contributors, watchers are more confident and contribute over a longer period of time in a more varied way than other contributors. This is likely attributable to the knowledge gained through project notifications.