Converging Work-Talk Patterns in Online Task-Oriented Communities

Abstract

Much of what we do is accomplished by working collaboratively with others, and a large portion of our lives are spent working and talking; the patterns embodied in the alternation of working and talking can provide much useful insight into task-oriented social behaviors. The available electronic traces of the different kinds of human activities in online communities are an empirical goldmine that can enable the holistic study and understanding of these social systems. Open Source Software (OSS) projects are prototypical examples of collaborative, task-oriented communities, depending on volunteers for high-quality work. Here, we use sequence analysis methods to identify the work-talk patterns of software developers in online communities of Open Source Software projects. We find that software developers prefer to persist in same kinds of activities, i.e., a string of work activities followed by a string of talk activities and so forth, rather than switch them frequently; this tendency strengthens with time, suggesting that developers become more efficient, and can work longer with fewer interruptions. This process is accompanied by the formation of community culture: developers’ patterns in the same communities get closer with time while different communities get relatively more different. The emergence of community culture is apparently driven by both “talk” and “work”. Finally, we also find that workers with good balance between “work” and “talk” tend to produce just as much work as those that focus strongly on “work”; however, the former appear to be more likely to continue to be active contributors in the communities.

Synchronous development in open-source projects: A higher-level perspective

“…The authors of the original study enhanced their work by identifying patterns on the time series of working activity in terms of source-code commits and communication activity in terms of replying to e-mails on the mailing list for developer pairs, which indicate that collaboration on source-code artifacts and coordinating events on the mailing list are temporally related (Xuan et al 2016). Gharehyazie and Filkov (2017) extended the original study by not investigating pairs of developers but groups of developers working on the same source-code artifacts temporally close-by.…”

Structure and Function of Task-Oriented Social Networks

“…It separately characterizes the existence of a relationship and its precise nature; thus, it enables more informed choices in modeling nonfunctional and nonlinear relationships, and a more nuanced indicator of potential problems with the values reported by standard and rank correlation measures. In our first study [15], we illustrated the use of MIC using a variety of software engineering metrics. We studied and explained the distributional properties of MIC and related measures in software engineering data, and illustrated the value of these measures for the empirical software engineering researcher.…”

“…Task Networks Communities of LikeCulture (Ref #15) We looked [15] at the emergence of larger, teamlevel, collaborative structures in task networks. We used sequence analysis methods to identify the worktalk patterns of software developers in these online communities.…”

An In-Depth Analysis of Occasional and Recurring Collaborations in Online Music Co-creation

“…Previous research on OSS development has proven the existence of co-development groups, i.e., latent socio-technical structures [4] formed by two or more developers (also referred to as implicit teams [38] and putative groups [20]) who tend to communicate often and work together on the same artifacts. There is also evidence that the members of these co-development groups are very productive and more likely to remain active within communities for longer [56]. Consistently, theories on group attachment suggest that groups who 'interact' (i.e., work and talk) rather than just 'coact' (i.e., work together without interaction) remain active longer and reach higher performances [6].…”