On the use of Internet Relay Chat (IRC) meetings by developers of the GNOME

GTK+ project

Emad ShihabZhen Ming JiangAhmed E. Hassan

Software Analysis and Intelligence Lab (SAIL)Queen’s University

OSS developers are distributed

Communication methods

EmailMailing lists

Instant Messaging

IRC Meetings

Asynch.

Synch.

One-to-One One-to-Many

Sample IRC meeting log

Start time

End time

Messages

Attendants

Our study

We performed a quantitative study on the usage of IRC meetings and studied the following 3 dimensions:

1.Discussion Volume (Are the meetings becoming more popular?)

2.Meeting Attendance (Are the meetings useful?)

3.Participants’ Contribution (Are participants active or just showing face?)

1. Discussion Volume

Number of message lines in IRC meetings per year

1. Increase in meeting attendants or2. Discussions are lasting longer.

2. Meeting Attendance

Number of meeting attendants per year

1. IRC meetings are becoming more popular or2. More developers are seeing the usefulness of the meetings.

3. Participants’ Contribution

1. Steady participant contribution.2. More even contribution in recent years

Number of message lines per participant per year

Summary

Summary