@conference {Padhye:2014:SEC:2597073.2597113,
	title = {A Study of External Community Contribution to Open-source Projects on GitHub},
	booktitle = {Proceedings of the 11th Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories},
	series = {MSR 2014},
	year = {2014},
	pages = {332{\textendash}335},
	publisher = {ACM},
	organization = {ACM},
	address = {New York, NY, USA},
	abstract = {Open-source software projects are primarily driven by community contribution. However, commit access to such projects{\textquoteright} software repositories is often strictly controlled. These projects prefer to solicit external participation in the form of patches or pull requests. In this paper, we analyze a set of 89 top-starred GitHub projects and their forks in order to explore the nature and distribution of such community contribution. We first classify commits (and developers) into three categories: core, external and mutant, and study the relative sizes of each of these classes through a ring-based visualization. We observe that projects written in mainstream scripting languages such as JavaScript and Python tend to include more external participation than projects written in upcoming languages such as Scala. We also visualize the geographic spread of these communities via geocoding. Finally, we classify the types of pull requests submitted based on their labels and observe that bug fixes are more likely to be merged into the main projects as compared to feature enhancements.
},
	keywords = {community participation, core committers, external contribution, mining challenge, mining software repositories, msr challenge, Open-source software, pull requests},
	isbn = {978-1-4503-2863-0},
	doi = {10.1145/2597073.2597113},
	url = {http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2597073.2597113},
	author = {Padhye, Rohan and Mani, Senthil and Sinha, Vibha Singhal}
}
@conference {1304,
	title = {Entering the circle of trust},
	booktitle = {Proceeding of the 8th working conference on Mining software repositories - MSR {\textquoteright}11},
	year = {2011},
	note = {"we started by analyzing 219 projects"
},
	month = {05/2011},
	pages = {133-142},
	publisher = {ACM Press},
	organization = {ACM Press},
	address = {New York, New York, USA},
	abstract = {The success of an open-source project depends to a large degree on the proactive and constructive participation by the developer community. An important role that developers play in a project is that of a code committer. However, code-commit privilege is typically restricted to the core group of a project. In this paper, we study the phenomenon of the induction of external developers as code committers. The trustworthiness of an external developer is one of the key factors that determines the granting of commit privileges. Therefore, we formulate different hypotheses to explain how the trust is established in practice. To investigate our hypotheses, we developed an automated approach based on mining code repositories and bug-tracking systems. We implemented the approach and performed an empirical study, using the Eclipse projects, to test the hypotheses. Our results indicate that, most frequently, developers establish trust and credibility in a project by contributing to the project in a non-committer role. Moreover, the employing organization of a developer is another factor--although a less significant one--that influences trust.},
	keywords = {bug tracking, bug tracking system, commits, committers, core, developers, eclipse, trust},
	isbn = {9781450305747},
	doi = {10.1145/1985441.1985462},
	author = {Mani, Senthil and Sinha, Saurabh and Sinha, Vibha Singhal}
}
