On the use of Internet Relay Chat (IRC) meetings by developers of the GNOME GTK+ project

TitleOn the use of Internet Relay Chat (IRC) meetings by developers of the GNOME GTK+ project
Publication TypeConference Paper
Year of Publication2009
AuthorsShihab, E, Jiang, ZM, Hassan, AE
Secondary Title2009 6th IEEE International Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR)2009 6th IEEE International Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories
Pagination107 - 110
PublisherIEEE
Place PublishedVancouver, BC, Canada
ISBN Number978-1-4244-3493-0
Keywordsgnome, gtk, irc, msr challenge
Abstract

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.

DOI10.1109/MSR.2009.5069488
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