@proceedings {1875, title = {Considering the use of walled gardens for FLOSS project communication}, year = {2017}, month = {05/2017}, abstract = {At its core, free, libre, and open source software (FLOSS) is defined by its adherence to a set of licenses that give various freedoms to the users of the software, for example the ability to use the software, to read or modify its source code, and to distribute the software to others. In addition, many FLOSS projects and developers also champion other values related to "freedom" and "openness", such as transparency, for example in communication and decision-making, or community-orientedness, for example in broadening access, collaboration, and participation. This paper explores how one increasingly common software development practice - communicating inside non-archived, third-party "walled gardens" - puts these FLOSS values into conflict. If communities choose to use non-archived walled gardens for communication, they may be prioritizing one type of openness (broad participation) over another (transparency). We use 18 FLOSS projects as a sample to describe how walled gardens are currently being used for intra-project communication, as well as to determine whether or not these projects provide archives of these communications. Findings will be useful to the FLOSS community as a whole as it seeks to under- stand the evolution and impact of its communication choices.}, keywords = {apache, chat, communication, email, free software, irc, mailing list, open source, Slack, Stack Overflow, teams, Wordpress}, doi = {10.1007/978-3-319-57735-7_1}, url = {https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007\%2F978-3-319-57735-7_1.pdf}, attachments = {https://flosshub.org/sites/flosshub.org/files/preprint_0.pdf}, author = {Squire, Megan} } @proceedings {1755, title = {Mining StackOverflow to Filter out Off-topic IRC Discussion}, year = {2015}, month = {05/2015}, abstract = {Internet Relay Chat (IRC) is a commonly used tool by OpenSource developers. Developers use IRC channels to discuss programming related problems, but much of the discussion is irrelevant and off-topic. Essentially if we treat IRC discussions like email messages, and apply spam filtering, we can try to filter out the spam (the off-topic discussions) from the ham (the programming discussions). Yet we need labelled data that unfortunately takes time to curate. To avoid costly curration in order to filter out off-topic discussions, we need positive and negative data-sources. Online discussion forums, such as StackOverflow, are very effective for solving programming problems. By engaging in open-data, StackOverflow data becomes a powerful source of labelled text regarding programming. This work shows that we can train classifiers using StackOverflow posts as positive examples of on-topic programming discussion. YouTube video comments, notorious for their lack of quality, serve as training set of offtopic discussion. By exploiting these datasets, accurate classifiers can be built, tested and evaluated that require very little effort for end-users to deploy and exploit.}, keywords = {irc, Stack Overflow, youtube}, attachments = {https://flosshub.org/sites/flosshub.org/files/shaiful-mining_so_0.pdf}, author = {Shaiful Alam Chowdhury and Hindle, Abram} } @proceedings {1715, title = {"Should we move to Stack Overflow?" Measuring the utility of social media for developer support}, year = {2015}, month = {05/2015}, pages = {10pp}, publisher = {IEEE}, abstract = {Stack Overflow is an enormously popular question-and-answer web site intended for software developers to help each other with programming issues. Some software projects aimed at developers (for example, application programming interfaces, application engines, cloud services, development frameworks, and the like) are closing their self-supported developer discussion forums and mailing lists and instead directing developers to use special-purpose tags on Stack Overflow. The goals of this paper are to document the main reasons given for moving developer support to Stack Overflow, and then to collect and analyze data from a group of software projects that have done this, in order to show whether the expected quality of support was actually achieved. The analysis shows that for all four software projects in this study, two of the desired quality indicators, developer participation and response time, did show improvements on Stack Overflow as compared to mailing lists and forums. However, we also found several projects that moved back from Stack Overflow, despite achieving these desired improvements. The results of this study are applicable to a wide variety of software projects that provide developer support using social media.}, keywords = {developer support, forums, mailing list, metrics, quality, social media, Stack Overflow, technical support}, attachments = {https://flosshub.org/sites/flosshub.org/files/SEIP2015stackv2.pdf}, author = {Squire, Megan} }