Software developers use many different communication tools and channels in their work. The diversity of these tools has dramatically increased over the past decade, giving rise to a wide range of socially enabled communication channels and social media that developers use to support their activities. The availability of such social tools is leading to a participatory culture of software development, where developers want to engage with, learn from, and co-create software with other developers. However, the interplay of these social channels, as well as the opportunities and challenges they may create when used together within this participatory development culture, are not yet well understood. In this paper, we report on a large-scale survey conducted with 1,449 GitHub users. We describe which channels these developers find essential to their work and gain an understanding of the challenges they face using them. Our findings lay the empirical foundation for providing recommendations to developers and tool designers on how to use and improve tools for developers.

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The software development community has embraced GitHub as an essential platform for managing their software projects. GitHub has created efficiencies and helped improve the way software professionals work. It not only provides a traceable project repository, but it acts as a social meeting place for interested parties, supporting communities of practice. Recently, educators have seen the potential in GitHub's collaborative features for managing and improving-perhaps even transforming-the learning experience.In this study, we examine how GitHub is emerging as a collaborative platform for education. We aim to understand how environments such as GitHub-environments that provide social and collaborative features in conjunction with distributed version control-may improve (or possibly hinder) the educational experience for students and teachers. We conduct a qualitative study focusing on how GitHub is being used in education, and the motivations, benefits and challenges it brings.

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