A Case Study on the Impact of Global Participation on Mailing Lists Communications of Open Source Projects

Participants from different countries and across diverse time zones discuss important design decisions and resolve conflicts in open source projects using mailing lists. A good understanding of the social structure of these mailing lists and the impact of the global participant pool on that structure helps in managing these projects. In this paper, we present a case study which investigates the impact of global participation on communication on the developer mailing list for two large open source projects: PostgreSQL and GTK+. We find that a small group of participants from a limited number of countries dominate the mailing list while the rest of the participants contribute equally across all countries. We show that discussion threads are becoming more spread out across the globe over time. We also analyze the response delay for inquiries by newcomers to the mailing list. The delay in response to the initial inquiry depends on the country of the poster and the time when the message was posted to the list. Our findings shed light into the distribution and flow of knowledge about open source projects around the world.