Understanding the User Interactions on GitHub: A Social Network Perspective

As one of the biggest online developer communities, GitHub supports interactions between millions of developers around the world. This paper focuses on detecting and analyzing the interactions on GitHub from several perspectives. First, from a global viewpoint, we build an interaction graph based on GitHub Events to investigate the general structure and attributes of the GitHub interaction network. Second, from the perspective of important users on GitHub, we pay particular attention to those who bridge social circles by spanning across communities. Concretely, we apply the structural hole theory to identify and explore the structural hole spanners in this interaction network. Last but not least, we compare structural hole spanners with ordinary users in several aspects and excavate distinctions between them. To our best knowledge, this is the first study that applies structural hole theory to the interaction graph of a leading social network. It not only provides a unique standpoint on user interactions, but also gives a comprehensive inspection of structural hole spanners.