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How Social Q&A Sites are Changing Knowledge Sharing in Open Source Software Communities
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BibTeX
@MISC{Vasilescu_howsocial,
author = {Bogdan Vasilescu and Er Serebrenik and Premkumar Devanbu and Vladimir Filkov},
title = {How Social Q&A Sites are Changing Knowledge Sharing in Open Source Software Communities},
year = {}
}
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Abstract
Historically, mailing lists have been the preferred means for coordinating development and user support activities. With the emergence and popularity growth of social Q&A sites such as the StackExchange network (e.g., StackOverflow), this is beginning to change. Such sites offer different socio-technical incentives to their participants than mailing lists do, e.g., rich web environments to store and manage content col-laboratively, or a place to showcase their knowledge and ex-pertise more visibly to peers or potential recruiters. A key difference between StackExchange and mailing lists is gam-ification, i.e., StackExchange participants compete to obtain reputation points and badges. Using a case study of R, a popular data analysis software, in this paper we investigate how mailing list participation has evolved since the launch of StackExchange. Our main contribution is assembling a joint data set from the two sources, in which participants in both the r-help mailing list and StackExchange are identi-fiable. This allows for linking their activities across the two resources and also over time. With this data set we found that user support activities are showing a strong shift away from r-help. In particular, mailing list experts are mi-grating to StackExchange, where their behaviour is different. First, participants active both on r-help and on StackEx-change are more active than those who focus exclusively on only one of the two. Second, they provide faster answers on StackExchange than on r-help, suggesting they are moti-vated by the gamified environment. To our knowledge, our study is the first to directly chart the changes in behaviour of specific contributors as they migrate into gamified environ-ments, and has important implications for knowledge man-agement in software engineering. Author Keywords Crowdsourced knowledge; social Q&A; mailing lists; open
Keyphrases
knowledge sharing open source software community user support activity mailing list participation gamified environment preferred mean popularity growth different socio-technical incentive key difference gamified environ-ments r-help mailing list case study popular data analysis software author keywords crowdsourced knowledge mailing list rich web environment main contribution stackexchange network joint data set strong shift list expert knowledge man-agement specific contributor potential recruiter software engineering reputation point data set important implication
