How social Q&A sites are changing knowledge sharing in open source software communities

Abstract

Historically, mailing lists have been the preferred means for coordinating development and user support activities. With the emergence and popularity growth of social Q&A sites such as the StackExchange network (e.g., StackOverflow), this is beginning to change. Such sites offer different sociotechnical incentives to their participants than mailing lists do, e.g., rich web environments to store and manage content collaboratively, or a place to showcase their knowledge and expertise more visibly to peers or potential recruiters. A key difference between StackExchange and mailing lists is gamification, i.e., StackExchange participants compete to obtain reputation points and badges. Using a case study of R, a popular data analysis software, in this paper we investigate how mailing list participation has evolved since the launch of StackExchange. Our main contribution is assembling a joint data set from the two sources, in which participants in both the r-help mailing list and StackExchange are identifiable. This allows for linking their activities across the two resources and also over time. With this data set we found that user support activities are showing a strong shift away from r-help. In particular, mailing list experts are migrating to StackExchange, where their behaviour is different. First, participants active both on r-help and on StackExchange are more active than those who focus exclusively on only one of the two. Second, they provide faster answers on StackExchange than on r-help, suggesting they are motivated by the gamified environment. To our knowledge, our study is the first to directly chart the changes in behaviour of specific contributors as they migrate into gamified environments, and has important implications for knowledge management in software engineering.

Impact of Gamification on Users Knowledge-Sharing Practices: Relationships between Work Motivation, Performance Expectancy and Work Engagement

“…In our context, knowledge-sharing practices seem to be positively impacted by the motivational dimension in which employees tend to be more engaged with their job as a consequence of different motivation drivers. Interestingly, social Q&A sites are already using gamification to increase the knowledge sharing practices of their participants [61]. Third, we found that performance expectancy directly and positively influences job engagement in the context of knowledge sharing.…”

How healthy are software engineering conferences?

“…For example, Mark van den Brand is also known as Mark G. J. van den Brand or M. G. J. van den Brand. To match multiple aliases for the same person we performed identity merging [16][17][18][19][20][21][22], and manually checked the results in a post-processing step. Table 2 shows all metrics we have used.…”

“…Most internal validity threats related to the data extraction step stem from possible incompleteness of the data sources we have used: e.g., while the SHINE database contains information about circa 1800 conferences 22 , as any such collection it is inherently incomplete, and therefore the CI (c) values might underestimate the true value of the conference h-index. Information about composition of the program committees has been taken from conference websites, proceedings volumes, the Wayback machine archive as well as announcements posted by conference organisers in Usenet newsgroups.…”

Holistic recommender systems for software engineering

“…The advent of internet, and crowdsourcing platforms like Stack Overflow opened the path to a vast amount of information, and inevitably changed the developers habits in retrieving the needed information. For example, as a direct consequence, venues for knowledge exchange moved from mailing lists to Q&A websites like Stack Overflow [VSDF14].…”