Understanding project dissemination on a social coding site

Abstract

Popular social coding sites like GitHub and BitBucket are changing software development. Users follow some interesting developers, listen to their activities and find new projects. Social relationships between users are utilized to disseminate projects, attract contributors and increase the popularity. A deep understanding of project dissemination on social coding sites can provide important insights into questions of project diffusion characteristics and into the improvement of the popularity. In this paper, we seek a deeper understanding of project dissemination in GitHub. We collect 2,665 projects and 272,874 events. Moreover, we crawl 747,107 developers and 2,234,845 social links to construct social graphs. We analyze topological characteristics and reciprocity of social graphs. We then study the speed and the range of project dissemination, and the role of social links. Our main observations are: (1) Social relationships are not reciprocal. (2) The popularity increases gradually for a long time. (3) Projects spread to users far away from their creators. (4) Social links play a notable role of project dissemination. These results can be leveraged to increase the popularity. Specifically, we suggest that project owners should (1) encourage experienced developers to choose some promising new developers, follow them in return and provide guidance. (2) promote projects for a long time. (3) advertise projects to a wide range of developers. (4) fully utilize social relationships to advertise projects and attract contributors.