Community, Time, and (Con)text: A Dynamical Systems Analysis of Online Communication and Community Health among Open‐Source Software Communities

Abstract

Free and open-source software projects have become essential digital infrastructure over the past decade. These projects are largely created and maintained by unpaid volunteers, presenting a potential vulnerability if the projects cannot recruit and retain new volunteers. At the same time, their development on open collaborative development platforms provides a nearly complete record of the community's interactions; this affords the opportunity to study naturally occurring language dynamics at scale and in a context with massive real-world impact. The present work takes a dynamical systems view of language to understand the ways in which communicative context and community membership shape the emergence and impact of language use-specifically, sentiment and expressions of gratitude. We then present evidence that these language dynamics shape newcomers' likelihood of returning,

Group coordination catalyzes individual and cultural intelligence

“…Shared language directly encodes beliefs about social roles. Further enhancing group complementarity and the assignment of roles, language can explicitly encode social roles, with discussion about who is doing what (Abney, Paxton, Dale, & Kello, 2021;Fusaroli et al, 2012;Paxton, Varoquaux, Holdgraf, & Geiger, 2022), about social network structure Sloman, Goldstone, & Gonzalez, 2021;Dubova, Moskvichev, & Goldstone, 2020), and about institutions of leadership (Sumpter, 2009;Shaw & Hill, 2014;Pietraszewski, 2020). Some languages use different pronouns to encode relative social status, closeness or formality, as in French with the more formal second-person pronoun vous used for those perceived as having higher social status, while tu marks a kind of closeness or intimacy (Agha, 1994;l'Huillier, 1999).…”

An Experimental Video Conference Platform to Bridge the Gap Between Digital and In-Person Communication

“…To investigate how easily our experimental video conferencing platform can be adopted and deployed, we conducted a take-home study where participants received instructions and deployed our platform. We also investigated and report principles that would welcome new contributors, as that is a key factor to the ultimate success of sustaining a new open source project [16]. In this work, we also give a short overview of the experimental hub's usage and system implementation of the networking, frontend, and backend architecture and technical design decisions.…”