%0 Conference Paper %B Proceedings of the 11th Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories %D 2014 %T Understanding "Watchers" on GitHub %A Sheoran, Jyoti %A Blincoe, Kelly %A Kalliamvakou, Eirini %A Damian, Daniela %A Ell, Jordan %K github %K mining challenge %K msr challenge %K repositories %K Software Teams %K Watchers %X 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. %B Proceedings of the 11th Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories %S MSR 2014 %I ACM %C New York, NY, USA %P 336–339 %@ 978-1-4503-2863-0 %U http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2597073.2597114 %R 10.1145/2597073.2597114