Open Source Software (OSS) development has attracted numerous developers. As a typical complex sociotechnical system, an OSS project often forms a hierarchical social structure where a few developers are elite while the rest are non-elite. Differences in social status may result in distinct language use behaviors in interpersonal communication. Characterizing such behaviors is critical for supporting efficient and effective communication among developers with different social statuses. This study empirically compared elite and non-elite developers' language behaviors in their communication. We compiled a corpus of - 216,000 discourses collected from 20 large projects on GitHub. We investigated the linguistic differences in three aspects, namely, linguistic styles and characters, main concerns, and sentence patterns. Our findings reveal that elite and non-elite developers showed different linguistic patterns and had different concerns in their discourses. Their discourses also reflect the variation of the main focuses in the development process. Furthermore, elite and non-elite developers exhibited noticeable patterns in their linguistic behaviors in accordance with their roles and corresponding divisions of labor in the production process, no matter which semantic contexts. These findings provide implications for supporting communication that crosses social statuses in OSS development.

Elite developers, who own the administrative privileges for a project, maintain a diverse profile of contributing activities, and drive the development of open source software (OSS). To advance our understanding and further support the OSS community, I present a fresh approach to investigate developers’ public activities from the fine-grained event data provided by GitHub. Further, I develop this approach into an analysis framework for collecting, modeling, and analyzing elite developers’ online contributing activities. Employing this framework, I have conducted empirical studies on various OSS projects and ecosystems to characterize elite developers’ full-spectrum activities and their dynamics, and also unveil relationships between their effort allocation and projects’ technical outcomes. Finally, I propose to design and implement a toolset based on this framework and my results to date, which supports individual developers’ decision-making and assists their routine workflows with automation.

Open source developers, particularly the elite developers who own the administrative privileges for a project, maintain a diverse portfolio of contributing activities. They not only commit source code but also exert significant efforts on other communicative, organizational, and supportive activities. However, almost all prior research focuses on specific activities and fails to analyze elite developers’ activities in a comprehensive way. To bridge this gap, we conduct an empirical study with fine-grained event data from 20 large open source projects hosted on G IT H UB . We investigate elite developers’ contributing activities and their impacts on project outcomes. Our analyses reveal three key findings: (1) elite developers participate in a variety of activities, of which technical contributions (e.g., coding) only account for a small proportion; (2) as the project grows, elite developers tend to put more effort into supportive and communicative activities and less effort into coding; and (3) elite developers’ efforts in nontechnical activities are negatively correlated with the project’s outcomes in terms of productivity and quality in general, except for a positive correlation with the bug fix rate (a quality indicator). These results provide an integrated view of elite developers’ activities and can inform an individual’s decision making about effort allocation, which could lead to improved project outcomes. The results also provide implications for supporting these elite developers.