Open source developers communicate with each other via various online outlets. Thus far, mailing lists have been the main coordination mechanism. However, our previous study shows that the use of developer IRC meetings is increasing in recent years. In this paper, we perform a study on the IRC meetings of two large open source projects: the GTK+ and Evolution projects. We explore three dimensions: who participates in the meetings, what do they discuss and how do they run the meetings. We find 1) that a small and stable number of the participants contribute the majority of messages in meetings, 2) that there are commonly discussed topics as well as project specific topics 3) that meeting styles vary across different projects.
Using the GTK and Evolution OSS projects Shihab et al. REF also established that only a small number of developers participated in internet relay chat (IRC) meetings.
Studying the use of developer IRC meetings in open source projects
2009 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance
2009 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance
Computer Science