What is the openness of a project?

We define the openness of a project as the tendency to accept changes from non-project members and to allow them to participate in the decision-making process.

What is this work about?

We believe that such a feature is important to attract (and capture) new developers in a open source project. Our aim is to give some findings about:

• How the community of the project is composed in terms of project and non-project members?
• How relevant are the non-project member contributions?
• How long does it take to become collaborator?

Why GitHub?

GitHub is arguably the largest and best-known social coding site, containing more than 10 million repositories, and has become one of the main references in open software development.

How can the openness of a project be evaluated?

We have defined three metrics to gain more insights into the openness level of open source projects, specifically:

• Community Composition
• External Contribution Analysis
• Time to Become Collaborator

We have analyzed a subset of GitHub projects (taken from the GHTorrent project) in order to explore their level of openness. Form this dataset, only 91 were original projects (i.e., they are not forked from other project) in GitHub. Thus, our metrics will be applied to these original projects.

If you do not find you project and want us to include it, just contact us.