Understanding the KDE Social Structure through Mining of Email Archive

Submitted by msquire on Tue, 2011-05-03 13:01

Title	Understanding the KDE Social Structure through Mining of Email Archive
Publication Type	Conference Paper
Year of Publication	2007
Authors	Studer, M, Müller, B, Ritschard, G
Secondary Title	2nd Workshop on Public Data about Software Development (WoPDaSD 2007)
Keywords	bug tracking system, bugzilla, commit, email, email archive, kde, mailing list, participation, revision control, social network analysis
Abstract	In order to achieve a better understanding of FLOSS social structure, we need a definition of social position. From a theoretical perspective, we propose to think the participation as a trajectory. Empirically, we use optimal matching to build a typology of participation trajectories based on KDE email archives. We show how these trajectories structure the community as a whole by combining these results with a social network analysis.
Notes	"Our data source is constituted by e-mails sent to KDE mailing-lists and archived by MARC" "Two problems quickly arise: neither the e-mails addresses nor the names can be considered unique. Consequently, we used an in-depth search algorithm to put together “name-email” couples corresponding to a same contributor. Indeed, the algorithm suggests possible merges." "There is a specific mailing list in our data set, kde-commit, which gathers automatic notifications from the revision control system (RCS)....We measure “commit” by the number of messages sent to the “kde-commit” mailing list. However, we did not count “silent” commits, nor usual messages sent to this mailing list." "We measured activities done in BTS in two ways: “bug opener” and “non bug opener”. First, we counted the number of modifications done by the contributor who opened the concerned bug report. "
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