"This is damn slick!": estimating the impact of tweets on open source project popularity and new contributors
"This is damn slick!": estimating the impact of tweets on open source project popularity and new contributors
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“这太狡猾了！”：估计推文对开源项目受欢迎程度和新贡献者的影响
DOI：
10.1145/3510003.3510121
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发表时间：
2022
期刊：
影响因子：
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通讯作者：
Vasilescu, Bogdan
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
Fang, Hongbo;Lamba, Hemank;Herbsleb, James;Vasilescu, Bogdan
Twitter被软件开发人员广泛使用。但是tweet在促进开源项目方面有多有效呢？如何使用Twitter来提高项目的受欢迎程度或吸引新的贡献者？在这篇论文中，我们报告了一项混合方法的实证研究，研究了44,544条推文，其中包含2370个开源GitHub资源库的链接，寻找这些推文对吸引GitHub新星和贡献者项目的因果影响的证据，并描述了高影响力的推文，可能被它们吸引的人，以及它们与以其他方式吸引的贡献者有何不同。在其他方面，我们发现推文对获得新星有统计上的显著和实际规模的影响，对吸引新贡献者的平均影响很小。推文的热度、内容，以及推文作者的身份，都会影响吸引效应的大小。此外，我们的定性分析表明，为开源项目建立一个活跃的Twitter社区在通过tweet吸引新的提交者方面发挥着重要作用。我们还报告说，GitHub的新手或长期使用Twitter但很少发布tweet的开发人员最有可能被tweet提到的资源库的贡献者所吸引。我们的工作对开源可持续发展的文献做出了贡献。
Twitter is widely used by software developers. But how effective are tweets at promoting open source projects? How could one use Twitter to increase a project's popularity or attract new contributors? In this paper we report on a mixed-methods empirical study of 44,544 tweets containing links to 2,370 open-source GitHub repositories, looking for evidence of causal effects of these tweets on the projects attracting new GitHub stars and contributors, as well as characterizing the high-impact tweets, the people likely being attracted by them, and how they differ from contributors attracted otherwise. Among others, we find that tweets have a statistically significant and practically sizable effect on obtaining new stars and a small average effect on attracting new contributors. The popularity, content of the tweet, as well as the identity of tweet authors all affect the scale of the attraction effect. In addition, our qualitative analysis suggests that forming an active Twitter community for an open source project plays an important role in attracting new committers via tweets. We also report that developers who are new to GitHub or have a long history of Twitter usage but few tweets posted are most likely to be attracted as contributors to the repositories mentioned by tweets. Our work contributes to the literature on open source sustainability.