From periphery to core: A temporal analysis of github contributors’ collaboration network

Open-source projects in GitHub exhibit rich temporal dynamics, and diverse contributors’ social interactions further intensify this process. In this paper, we analyze temporal patterns associated with Open Source Software (OSS) projects and how the contributor’s notoriety grows and fades over time in a core-periphery structure. In order to explore the temporal dynamics of GitHub communities we formulate a time series clustering model using both Social Network Analysis (SNA) and technical metrics. By applying an adaptive time frame incremental approach to clustering, we locate contributors in different temporal networks. We demonstrate our approach on five long-lived OSS projects involving more than 700 contributors and found that there are three main temporal shapes of attention when contributors shift from periphery to core. Our analyses provide insights into common temporal patterns of the growing OSS communities on GitHub and broaden the understanding of the dynamics and motivation of open source contributors. © IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2017.