Does the First-Response Matter for Future Contributions? A Study of First Contributions

Abstract

Open Source Software (OSS) projects rely on a continuous stream of new contributors for their livelihood. Recent studies reported that new contributors experience many barriers in their first contribution, with the social barrier being critical. Although a number of studies investigated the social barriers to new contributors, we hypothesize that negative first responses may cause an unpleasant feeling, and subsequently lead to the discontinuity of any future contribution. We execute protocols of a registered report to analyze 2,765,917 first contributions as Pull Requests (PRs) with 642,841 first responses. We characterize most first response as being positive, but less responsive, and exhibiting sentiments of fear, joy and love. Results also indicate that negative first responses have the literal intention to arouse emotions of being either constructive (50.71%) or criticizing (37.68%) in nature. Running different machine learning models, we find that predicting future interactions is low (F1 score of 0.6171), but relatively better than baselines. Furthermore, an analysis of these models show that interactions are positively correlated with a future contribution, with other dimensions (i.e., project, contributor, contribution) having a large effect.

Noppadol Assavakamhaenghan

Data Scientist

I am currently a data scientist at AIA Thailand. My areas of interest are Machine learning and Data Mining. I experienced working in various data mining projects by using Python. I am eager to learn new knowledge and love to find a better solution to a problem. In addition, I am interested in finding new experiences and working with people in a cross-cultural team.