Techniques for Identifying the Country Origin of Mailing List Participants

Developer mailing lists play a central role in facilitating communication in open source projects. Participants from different countries and across diverse time zones discuss and resolve important design decisions or conflicts. A good understanding of the social structure of these mailing lists helps in managing these projects and in shaping their implementation structure (i.e., design and architecture). In this paper, we present a technique to determine the country of a mailing list participant. A case study on the developer mailing list for two large open source projects (i.e., PostgreSQL and GTK+) shows that our technique outperforms prior technique.