This document discusses the development of a navigation dashboard to support the evolution of open source software communities. It describes related work on social network analysis and text mining of communities. A survey of open source developers found interest in visualizing the overall community and changes over time through metrics and network graphs. A prototype dashboard was created integrating data from code repositories and mailing lists of three bioinformatics projects. Feedback from community members praised the social network graph and saw potential uses for recruitment, funding, and comparing projects. The conclusions identify interest in reflecting community evolution and network visualizations, with an outlook on expanding text analysis and social features to better support open source communities.

1. Lehrstuhl Informatik 5
(Information Systems)
Prof. Dr. M. Jarke
I5-AH-052014-1
Learning
Layers
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Navigation Support in Evolving
Communities by a Web-based
Dashboard
Anna Hannemann, Kristjan Liiva, Ralf Klamma
RWTH Aachen University
Advanced Community Information Systems (ACIS)
hannemann@dbis.rwth-aachen.de

2. Lehrstuhl Informatik 5
(Information Systems)
Prof. Dr. M. Jarke
I5-AH-052014-2
Learning
Layers Agenda
 Motivation
 Related Systems
 Study Settings
 Feedback from OSS Communities
 Navigation Dashboard
 Dashboard Evaluation within OSS Communities
 Conclusions and Outlook
Navigation Support in Evolving OSS
Communities

3. Lehrstuhl Informatik 5
(Information Systems)
Prof. Dr. M. Jarke
I5-AH-052014-3
Learning
Layers
Research Question
Are the OSS communities interested in a platform
which reflects community evolution and if so, what
evolution aspects should it reflect?

4. Lehrstuhl Informatik 5
(Information Systems)
Prof. Dr. M. Jarke
I5-AH-052014-4
Learning
Layers
Motivation
 Success of OSS project tightly interwoven with
success of OSS community (Raymond, 1999) ,(Ye et al., 2004), (Von Hippel and
von Krogh, 2003)
 Awareness of other developers essential for intact
OSS project life (Gutwin et al., 2004)
– Shared perception model
– Feeling of belonging/Shared faith
 Collaboration reflection
 Conflicts and problems discovery
4

5. Lehrstuhl Informatik 5
(Information Systems)
Prof. Dr. M. Jarke
I5-AH-052014-5
Learning
Layers
Related Systems
 Recent OSS research
– Social network analysis (Bird et al., 2006)
– Text mining (Bohn et al., 2011)
– Sentiment analysis (Jensen et al., 2011)
 Code-related statistics
– GitHub, Ohloh, SourceForge, FLOSSMetrics (Herraiz et al.,
2009)
 Contributor-related statistics
– GitHub, Ohloh, Open Source Report Card, Sargas (de Sousa
et al., 2009)
5

6. Lehrstuhl Informatik 5
(Information Systems)
Prof. Dr. M. Jarke
I5-AH-052014-6
Learning
Layers
Research Question
Are the OSS communities interested in a platform
which reflects community evolution and if so, what
evolution aspects should it reflect?

7. Lehrstuhl Informatik 5
(Information Systems)
Prof. Dr. M. Jarke
I5-AH-052014-7
Learning
Layers
Study Settings
 OSS developers survey
 Internal evaluation with computer scientists
 Prototype evaluation within OSS communities
7

8. Lehrstuhl Informatik 5
(Information Systems)
Prof. Dr. M. Jarke
I5-AH-052014-8
Learning
Layers
OSS Developers Survey
 IRC: OpenStack, PostgreSQL, GIMP, Mozilla, GNOME,
TomCat, VM VirtualBox
 32 responses and 49 comments
 75% interested in statistics on whole community not
restricted to developers
 71.9% interested in a network view on community
 64.5% interested in text-mining
 31.3% sentiment analysis
 Aggregated statistics
 Integration in existing tools
8

9. Lehrstuhl Informatik 5
(Information Systems)
Prof. Dr. M. Jarke
I5-AH-052014-9
Learning
Layers
OSS Navigation Dashboard
9

10. Lehrstuhl Informatik 5
(Information Systems)
Prof. Dr. M. Jarke
I5-AH-052014-10
Learning
Layers
OSS Dashboard Design and
Development
 Web-based dashboard
 Data from mailing lists and code repositories of three
bioinformatics OSS (Hannemann and Klamma, 2013)
– Graph widget + search and zooming function
– Community mood vs. development progress
– Outflow vs. inflow
– Communication vs. development progress
 Evaluation with 12 computer scientists
- General suggestions
- Bug reports 10

11. Lehrstuhl Informatik 5
(Information Systems)
Prof. Dr. M. Jarke
I5-AH-052014-11
Learning
Layers
Feedback from OSS Communities
 Exhaustive email reviews from nine OSS members
 Blog post about OSS Dashboard by Biopython
Developer http://bytesizebio.net/2013/09/07/bio-projects-a-history-
in-graphs/
 Most praise and interest to social network graph
 Interest in central nodes
 Interest in mood estimation
 Potential for recruiting and funding
 Learn how project evolves
 Compare with competitors
11

12. Lehrstuhl Informatik 5
(Information Systems)
Prof. Dr. M. Jarke
I5-AH-052014-12
Learning
Layers
Conclusions and Outlook
 Conclusions
– High interest in reflection of community evolution
– Special interest in network graph visualization
– Aggregated statistics preferred
 Outlook
– Topic-based text mining
– More social network analysis functionalities
– Dashboard concept to support and manage an OSS
community around EU projects
12