# Understanding How GitHub Supports
## 2 Related Work  
### The GitHub Environment  
GitHub is known as a social coding service for software developers to host source code artifacts and to collaborate with others using its social features [1; 2]. In recent years, GitHub has become a popular site for researchers to study online software practices. [PERSON] et al. (2012) found that GitHub features are signals for software developers to make social inferences [1]. For example, the recent activity and frequency of maintenance of a repository are signs of the project's liveliness, the number of followers a developer has is interpreted as the community status, and the number of stars and forks indicate the quality of a software project [1]. [PERSON] et al. (2013) found that software developers systematically use available cues in GitHub to form an impression about peers in collaboration, e.g., to find out more information, such as interaction style and expertise, about the contributor when responding to code commits [2]. Specifically, [PERSON] et al. (2014) focused on analyzing the GitHub features adopted in evaluating pull requests and found that some features, such as the status of the developers in the community, are likely to increase the acceptance rate [8].  
These studies distinguish curation on GitHub from that on other social media sites in the following aspects. First, the user base of GitHub is converged, consisting of a dominating population of software developers focusing on software practices. Conversely, social media sites, such as Twitter and Pinterest, have a very general user base comprising users that curate for \"Entertainment & Hobbies\" [5], or \"Food & Drink\", \"DIY & Craft\", \"Home Decor\", and \"Women's Fashion\" [9]. Second, GitHub concentrates on software practice, where features for collaboration are emphasized [1; 2; 8], while curation in other social media sites focuses on individuals and does not emphasize collaboration among its users [6; 9]. The comparison leaves an interesting question concerning the characteristics of GitHub as an entirely different environment for curation.  
Activities on GitHub are organized around repositories. Specifically, a GitHub repository is the basic unit to organize a software project and related activities ([[https://guides.github.com/activities/hello-world/](https://guides.github.com/activities/hello-world/)]([https://guides.github.com/activities/hello-world/](https://guides.github.com/activities/hello-world/))). GitHub users can send pull requests to a repository for making code contributions or comment in the issue tracker for bug-reporting or feature-requesting [1]. In addition, in 2012, GitHub announced a new feature that allows users to mark a repository as interesting by giving it a \"star\" ([[https://github.com/blog/1204-notifications-stars](https://github.com/blog/1204-notifications-stars)]([https://github.com/blog/1204-notifications-stars](https://github.com/blog/1204-notifications-stars))). Today, stars are considered an important indicator of the popularity of a repository [7]. [PERSON] et al. (2014) found that the number of stars a repository receives follows a power-law distribution, which means that a large amount of community attention is focusing on a small number of repositories [10]. A curation repository is a GitHub repository that is created for the purpose of curation, which is an appropriation of GitHub features designed for software collaboration. We are interested in understanding (1) the way that GitHub features are adopted, and (2) how activities are organized around a curation repository.