In GitHub the main external contributions are pull requests. Pull requests can be provided by any GitHub user and they can be accepted or rejected only by project members or collaborators (according to our community classification). Thus, we are interested in analysing the number of pull requests from external contributors and how many of them have been accepted and rejected. Furthermore, we are also interested in studying the average time an external pull request takes to be closed (e.e., accepted or rejected).

This metric may indicate how project members take into consideration external contributions as well as it may serve to encourage (or discourage) external contributors to participate in the project. Below, we present the results of the community composition analysis for the 91 GitHub original projects of our dataset.