%0 Conference Paper %B 2009 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance (ICSM) %D 2009 %T Studying the use of developer IRC meetings in open source projects %A Shihab, Emad %A Zhen Ming Jiang %A Hassan, Ahmed E. %K evolution %K gtk %K irc %X Open source developers communicate with each other via various online outlets. Thus far, mailing lists have been the main coordination mechanism. However, our previous study shows that the use of developer IRC meetings is increasing in recent years. In this paper, we perform a study on the IRC meetings of two large open source projects: the GTK+ and Evolution projects. We explore three dimensions: who participates in the meetings, what do they discuss and how do they run the meetings. We find (1) that a small and stable number of the participants contribute the majority of messages in meetings, (2) that there are commonly discussed topics as well as project specific topics (3) that meeting styles vary across different projects. %B 2009 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance (ICSM) %I IEEE %C Edmonton, AB, Canada %P 147 - 156 %@ 978-1-4244-4897-5 %U http://sail.cs.queensu.ca/publications/pubs/icsm2009_shihab.pdf %R 10.1109/ICSM.2009.5306333 %0 Conference Paper %B 2009 6th IEEE International Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR)2009 6th IEEE International Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories %D 2009 %T On the use of Internet Relay Chat (IRC) meetings by developers of the GNOME GTK+ project %A Shihab, Emad %A Zhen Ming Jiang %A Hassan, Ahmed E. %K gnome %K gtk %K irc %K msr challenge %X Developers of open source projects are distributed across the world. They rely on email, mailing lists, instant messaging, IRC channels and more recently IRC meetings to communicate. Most of the studies thus far focus on the use of mailing lists by OSS developers, however, an increasing number of open source projects are using IRC meetings to hold developer meetings. In this paper, we mine the #gtk-devel IRC meeting channel and study the usage of the IRC meetings held by the GNOME GTK+ core developers and maintainers. We look at three different dimensions: the discussion volume of the meetings, the number of participants attending the meetings and the activity of these participants. Our findings show that IRC meetings are gaining popularity among open source developers and maintainers: the IRC meeting discussions are increasing in volume, have increasing attendance levels, and the participants actively contribute to the meetings. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study on the use of developer IRC meetings by OSS developers. %B 2009 6th IEEE International Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR)2009 6th IEEE International Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories %I IEEE %C Vancouver, BC, Canada %P 107 - 110 %@ 978-1-4244-3493-0 %R 10.1109/MSR.2009.5069488 %> https://flosshub.org/sites/flosshub.org/files/107MSR2009-MSR-0130-Shihab-Emad.pdf