Hosting platforms for software projects can form collaborative social networks and a prime example of this is GitHub which is arguably the most popular platform of this kind. An open source project recommendation system could be a major feature for a platform like GitHub, enabling its users to find relevant projects in a fast and simple manner. We perform network analysis on a constructed graph based on GitHub data and present a recommendation system that uses link prediction.
@cite_1 performed structural analysis of several GitHub networks ranging from followers network, collaboration network to geographically separated networks. They confirm our assumption that GitHub collaboration graph is also small-world, as they report a high clustering coefficient. Along with high clustering, only a fraction of projects were reported to have high amount of collaborations. This is intuitively true, as GitHub is not used merely for collaboration and social aspects, but also as a hub for storing source code and for self-promotion, so we have a lot of repositories with only one collaborator. The authors also discovered that users who are geographically close are more likely to collaborate together on a project.
@cite_1
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GitHub is the most popular repository for open source code. It has more than 3.5 million users, as the company declared in April 2013, and more than 10 million repositories, as of December 2013. It has a publicly accessible API and, since March 2012, it also publishes a stream of all the events occurring on public projects. Interactions among GitHub users are of a complex nature and take place in different forms. Developers create and fork repositories, push code, approve code pushed by others, bookmark their favorite projects and follow other developers to keep track of their activities. In this paper we present a characterization of GitHub, as both a social network and a collaborative platform. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first quantitative study about the interactions happening on GitHub. We analyze the logs from the service over 18 months (between March 11, 2012 and September 11, 2013), describing 183.54 million events and we obtain information about 2.19 million users and 5.68 million repositories, both growing linearly in time. We show that the distributions of the number of contributors per project, watchers per project and followers per user show a power-law-like shape. We analyze social ties and repository-mediated collaboration patterns, and we observe a remarkably low level of reciprocity of the social connections. We also measure the activity of each user in terms of authored events and we observe that very active users do not necessarily have a large number of followers. Finally, we provide a geographic characterization of the centers of activity and we investigate how distance influences collaboration.