@conference {Sheoran:2014:UWG:2597073.2597114, title = {Understanding "Watchers" on GitHub}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the 11th Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories}, series = {MSR 2014}, year = {2014}, pages = {336{\textendash}339}, publisher = {ACM}, organization = {ACM}, address = {New York, NY, USA}, 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. }, keywords = {github, mining challenge, msr challenge, repositories, Software Teams, Watchers}, isbn = {978-1-4503-2863-0}, doi = {10.1145/2597073.2597114}, url = {http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2597073.2597114}, author = {Sheoran, Jyoti and Blincoe, Kelly and Kalliamvakou, Eirini and Damian, Daniela and Ell, Jordan} }