Identifying Emergent Leadership in OSS Projects Based on Communication Styles

Abstract

In open source software (OSS) communities, existing leadership indicators are dominantly measured by code contribution or community influence. Recent studies on emergent leadership shed light on additional dimensions such as intellectual stimulation in collaborative communications. To that end, this paper proposes an automated approach, named iLead, to mine communication styles and identify emergent leadership behaviors in OSS communities, using issue comments data. We start with the construction of 6 categories of leadership behaviors based on existing leadership studies. Then, we manually label leadership behaviors in 10,000 issue comments from 10 OSS projects, and extract 304 heuristic linguistic patterns which represent different types of emergent leadership behaviors in flexible and concise manners. Next, an automated algorithm is developed to merge and consolidate different pattern sets extracted from multiple projects into a final pattern ranking list, which can be applied for the automatic leadership identification. The evaluation results show that iLead can achieve a median precision of 0.82 and recall of 0.78, outperforming ten machine/deep learning baselines.To demonstrate practical usefulness, we also conduct empirical analysis and human evaluation of the identified leadership behaviors from iLead. We argue that emergent leadership behaviors in issue discussion should be taken into consideration to broaden existing OSS leadership viewpoints. Practical insights on community building and leadership skill development are offered for OSS community and individual developers, respectively. CCS Concepts: • Software and its engineering → Open source model.

Comparative Performance of Machine Learning Algorithms for Predicting Future Committer in Blockchain Projects

“…Over the past couple of decades, OSS has profoundly impacted on how software is developed, delivered, tested, shared, and maintained [21][22][23]. In recent times blockchain projects have been considered a new form of OSS project, that development relies fundamentally on a global community of developers for performing a variety of tasks such as reporting bugs, submitting feature requests, contributing patches and code, providing documentation, and performing beta testing [1,22].…”