Conference Paper
Understanding Developers’ Linguistic Behaviors in Hierarchical Open Source Communities
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Date
2020
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European Society for Socially Embedded Technologies (EUSSET)
Abstract
Online communication among developers is critical for the success of Open Source Software (OSS) communities. As a typical complex sociotechnical system, an OSS community often forms a hierarchical structure in which a few developers are elite while the rest are non-elite. The differences in social status among developers would unavoidably result in different linguistic behaviors. I sought to develop an understanding towards such differences in linguistic behaviors and how they influence project outcomes. Using data from GITHUB, I designed three interrelated studies. The first will characterize such differences at a collective level. The second will further explore the dynamic changes on linguistic behaviors with the focus on individual developers who experience non-elite and elite transitions. The last aims to quantify the impacts of linguistic behaviors on project outcomes. I also plan to build a tool to help developers achieve better communication within and across hierarchies