Social coding in GitHub: transparency and collaboration in an open software repository
Abstract
Social applications on the web let users track and follow the activities of a large number of others regardless of location or affiliation. There is a potential for this transparency to radically improve collaboration and learning in complex knowledge-based activities. Based on a series of in-depth interviews with central and peripheral GitHub users, we examined the value of transparency for large-scale distributed collaborations and communities of practice. We find that people make a surprisingly rich set of social inferences from the networked activity information in GitHub, such as inferring someone else's technical goals and vision when they edit code, or guessing which of several similar projects has the best chance of thriving in the long term. Users combine these inferences into effective strategies for coordinating work, advancing technical skills and managing their reputation.
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OSS projects, with their collaborative nature and publicly accessible repositories, offer a unique context to study the adoption of GenAI tools.
“These projects, with their collaborative nature and publicly accessible repositories [9], offer a unique context to study the adoption of GenAI tools.”
From Self-Admitted GenAI Usage in Open-Source Software (2026) · cites this paper as [9]
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“Our empirical analysis focuses on GitHub data at the level of repository, which serves as the basic unit for collaborative software development (Dabbish et al. 2012, Kalliamvakou et al. 2015, Celińska 2018).”
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Self-Admitted GenAI Usage in Open-Source Software
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- Authors
- Dabbish, L., Stuart, C., Tsay, J., & Herbsleb, J.
- Affiliations
- Carnegie Mellon University (US)
- Venue
- Proceedings of the ACM 2012 conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work
- Publisher
- ACM
- Published
- 2012-02-11
- Pages
- 1277-1286
- OpenAlex
- W2124100711
- Cited by
- 999
- References
- 4
- Citations by year
- 2026: 50 · 2025: 63 · 2024: 44 · 2023: 53 · 2022: 68 · 2021: 99 · 2020: 84 · 2019: 99 · 2018: 87 · 2017: 71 · 2016: 70 · 2015: 88 · 2014: 69 · 2013: 34 · 2012: 20
- FWCI
- 45.86
- Type
- conference paper
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) (publishedVersion)
- Funders
- National Science Foundation
- Carnegie Mellon University
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Science Applications › Open Source Software Innovations
- Social Sciences › Communication › Knowledge Management and Sharing
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Information Systems › Software Engineering Techniques and Practices
- Keywords
- social coding, GitHub, transparency, social inference, distributed collaboration, communities of practice, online collaboration, reputation management, code editing, technical skills
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