Article

Understanding "watchers" on GitHub

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Jordan EllAuthors Info & Claims

MSR 2014: Proceedings of the 11th Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories

Pages 336 - 339

https://doi.org/10.1145/2597073.2597114

Published: 31 May 2014 Publication History

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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.

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Cited By

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Venigalla AChimalakonda S(2024)An exploratory study of software artifacts on GitHub from the lens of documentationInformation and Software Technology10.1016/j.infsof.2024.107425(107425)Online publication date: Feb-2024
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.infsof.2024.107425
Kapitsaki GPapoutsoglou M(2024)The Current Status of Open Source ERP Systems: A GitHub AnalysisReuse and Software Quality10.1007/978-3-031-66459-5_11(171-188)Online publication date: 13-Jul-2024
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-66459-5_11
Qiu HLieb AChou JCarneal MMok JAmspoker EVasilescu BDabbish L(2023)Climate Coach: A Dashboard for Open-Source Maintainers to Overview Community DynamicsProceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3544548.3581317(1-18)Online publication date: 19-Apr-2023
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Index Terms

Understanding "watchers" on GitHub
1. Social and professional topics
  1. Professional topics
    1. Management of computing and information systems
      1. Project and people management
2. Software and its engineering
  1. Software creation and management
    1. Software development process management
  2. Software notations and tools
    1. Software configuration management and version control systems

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Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

MSR 2014: Proceedings of the 11th Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories

May 2014

427 pages

ISBN:9781450328630

DOI:10.1145/2597073

General Chair:
Premkumar Devanbu
University of California at Davis, USA
,
Program Chairs:
Sung Kim
Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, China
,
Martin Pinzger
University of Klagenfurt, Austria

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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TCSE: IEEE Computer Society's Tech. Council on Software Engin.

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 31 May 2014

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ICSE '14

Sponsor:

SIGSOFT

ICSE '14: 36th International Conference on Software Engineering

May 31 - June 1, 2014

Hyderabad, India

Upcoming Conference

ICSE 2025

2025 IEEE/ACM 46th International Conference on Software Engineering

April 26 - May 3, 2025

Ottawa , ON , Canada

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Venigalla AChimalakonda S(2024)An exploratory study of software artifacts on GitHub from the lens of documentationInformation and Software Technology10.1016/j.infsof.2024.107425(107425)Online publication date: Feb-2024
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.infsof.2024.107425
Kapitsaki GPapoutsoglou M(2024)The Current Status of Open Source ERP Systems: A GitHub AnalysisReuse and Software Quality10.1007/978-3-031-66459-5_11(171-188)Online publication date: 13-Jul-2024
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-66459-5_11
Qiu HLieb AChou JCarneal MMok JAmspoker EVasilescu BDabbish L(2023)Climate Coach: A Dashboard for Open-Source Maintainers to Overview Community DynamicsProceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3544548.3581317(1-18)Online publication date: 19-Apr-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3544548.3581317
Nikeghbal NHossein Kargaran AHeydarnoori ASchütze H(2023)GIRT-Data: Sampling GitHub Issue Report Templates2023 IEEE/ACM 20th International Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR)10.1109/MSR59073.2023.00026(104-108)Online publication date: May-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/MSR59073.2023.00026
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Seker ADiri BArslan HAmasyalı M(2022)Open Source Software Development ChallengesResearch Anthology on Agile Software, Software Development, and Testing10.4018/978-1-6684-3702-5.ch102(2134-2164)Online publication date: 2022
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Liu YNoei ELyons K(2022)How ReadMe files are structured in open source Java projectsInformation and Software Technology10.1016/j.infsof.2022.106924148(106924)Online publication date: Aug-2022
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Chen ZMa WChen LSong W(2022)Collaboration in software ecosystemsInformation and Software Technology10.1016/j.infsof.2022.106849145:COnline publication date: 1-May-2022
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