# Understanding How GitHub Supports
## 1 Introduction  
GitHub is an online service for source code hosting and software project collaboration. It provides features for coordinating work, such as the issue tracker for a repository to discuss software features and bugs and the pull-request mechanism for software developers to make contributions to other repositories [1; 2]. It also includes social features, such as following other GitHub users to make connections and receiving updates of others from activity traces [1; 2]. Recently, software developers began to create GitHub repositories that systematically organize and index the Internet resources (Figure 1), and many gained notable popularity. Studies of this phenomenon have investigated the motivations of curators and user experiences with curation repositories [3; 4]. The analysis of GitHub features for supporting curation, as well as the role that curation repositories have been playing in the software developers' community, are still missing. Therefore, in this paper, we are interested in adding to the literature by understanding the way that GitHub features are applied in curation repositories as well as the functions of curation repositories in the software developers' community. In recent years, curation behavior has been investigated in the context of social media sites, such as Twitter and Pinterest, and with respect to media contents, such as videos, images, text (tweets), and hyperlinks to other online resources [5; 6]. Curation in GitHub is distinct from curation in those websites of in the following ways. First, hyperlinks posted in GitHub curation repositories are directed at the software developers' community, whose members share and cultivate a professional interest in software development. Second, the curation on GitHub is embedded in the context of GitHub, which is an ensemble of social coding features intended for software development and collaboration rather than for curation. The GitHub context raises interesting questions concerning how its features support such an appropriation for curation and what role it serves for this specific community. Therefore, this paper attempts to answer the following overarching research question:  
_RQ: How does GitHub support curation practices?_  
To answer this research question, we first compare how curation repositories are different from typical software repositories. As a relatively new way to utilize GitHub, users are likely to participate in such kind of repository differently. This relates not only to the number of GitHub users who star a repository, which usually shows a user's interests towards a repository [7; 8], but also to the different types of activities that take place inside a curation repository, such as pull requests [8]. Thus, we explore our initial research question through the specific sub-research questions outlined below. _RQ1: How are curation repositories different from the typical software repositories of GitHub_? Prior literature has documented software practices on GitHub well [1; 2; 8], and some literature has provided insights into the curator's motivations and the users' experiences with curation repositories [3; 4]. However, a gap still exists in how GitHub features are utilized in curation repositories and how they are adopted differently, as compared to the intended software practice. This research question intends to close this gap and to provide an account of the categories and user participation that make curation repositories different. In addition to the comparison with software repositories, currently, we have little understanding of the details of curation repositories in terms of what kind of needs they address and what role they play in the software developers' community. Thus, the following research question will be investigated next.