Investigating the Impact of GitHub Discussions on Maintainers’ Workload and Community Dynamics
Abstract
The introduction of GitHub Discussions, a space for informal communication on GitHub, offers open-source communities a mechanism for engaging contributors beyond traditional issue tracking and code review. While promising, the specific effects of GitHub Discussions on project sustainability, contributor integration, and collaboration dynamics remain underexplored. This study investigates the impact of GitHub Discussions across four high-activity OSS projects by examining (1) changes in maintainers’ workload, (2) newcomer participation and progression from GitHub Discussions to technical contribution, and (3) the evolving structure of social and technical roles in project collaboration networks. Using data from the GitHub API, we collected and analyzed issues, pull requests, and discussions over a 48-month period.We applied linear regression and longitudinal social network analysis to evaluate participation trends and role centrality. Our results show that GitHub Discussions had limited impact on overall maintainer workload but served as a valuable entry point for newcomers, with a subset transitioning into impactful technical contributors. Nearly 80% of these newcomers had pull requests accepted, and many became active reviewers. In addition, GitHub Discussions enabled a shift in collaboration patterns, with non-core contributors increasingly occupying central positions in project networks. These findings underscore the strategic role of GitHub Discussions in supporting more inclusive, distributed, and sustainable OSS collaboration. GitHub Discussions help lower entry barriers, foster long-term contributor engagement, and redistribute influence beyond core teams. Future research should explore how discussion dynamics influence project governance, contributor retention, and the integration of non-code contributions into project health metrics.
Keywords:
Open Source, Communication, Discussions, GitHub
References
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Márcia Lima, Igor Steinmacher, Denae Ford, Grace Vorreuter, Ludimila Gonçalves, Tayana Conte, and Bruno Gadelha. 2025. How are discussions linked? A link analysis study on GitHub Discussions. Journal of Systems and Software 219 (2025), 112196.
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Jennifer Marlow, Laura Dabbish, and Jim Herbsleb. 2013. Impression Formation in Online Peer Production: Activity Traces and Personal Profiles in Github. In Proceedings of the 2013 Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (San Antonio, Texas, USA). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 117–128.
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Nachiappan Nagappan, Thomas Ball, and Andreas Zeller. 2006. Mining metrics to predict component failures. In Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Software Engineering (Shanghai, China) (ICSE ’06). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 452–461. DOI: 10.1145/1134285.1134349
Ifraz Rehman, Dong Wang, Raula Gaikovina Kula, Takashi Ishio, and Kenichi Matsumoto. 2020. Newcomer Candidate: Characterizing Contributions of a Novice Developer to GitHub. In 2020 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME). 855–855. DOI: 10.1109/ICSME46990.2020.00110
George AF Seber and Alan J Lee. 2012. Linear regression analysis. John Wiley & Sons.
Igor Steinmacher, Tayana Conte, Marco Aurélio Gerosa, and David Redmiles. 2015. Social Barriers Faced by Newcomers Placing Their First Contribution in Open Source Software Projects. In Proceedings of the 18th ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work; Social Computing (Vancouver, BC, Canada) (CSCW ’15). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1379–1392. DOI: 10.1145/2675133.2675215
Igor Steinmacher, Gustavo Pinto, Igor Scaliante Wiese, and Marco Aurélio Gerosa. 2018. Almost There: A Study on Quasi-Contributors in Open-Source Software Projects. In 2018 IEEE/ACM 40th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE). 256–266. DOI: 10.1145/3180155.3180208
Margaret-Anne Storey, Christoph Treude, Arie van Deursen, and Li-Te Cheng. 2010. The impact of social media on software engineering practices and tools. In Proceedings of the FSE/SDP Workshop on Future of Software Engineering Research (Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA) (FoSER ’10). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 359–364. DOI: 10.1145/1882362.1882435
Margaret-Anne Storey, Alexey Zagalsky, Fernando Figueira Filho, Leif Singer, and Daniel M. German. 2017. How Social and Communication Channels Shape and Challenge a Participatory Culture in Software Development. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering 43, 2 (2017), 185–204. DOI: 10.1109/TSE.2016.2584053
Bianca Trinkenreich, Mariam Guizani, Igor Wiese, Anita Sarma, and Igor Steinmacher. 2020. Hidden Figures: Roles and Pathways of Successful OSS Contributors. Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact. 4, CSCW2, Article 180 (2020), 22 pages. DOI: 10.1145/3415251
Jason Tsay, Laura Dabbish, and James Herbsleb. 2014. Let’s talk about it: evaluating contributions through discussion in GitHub. In Proceedings of the 22nd ACM SIGSOFT international symposium on foundations of software engineering. 144–154.
Bogdan Vasilescu, Vladimir Filkov, and Alexander Serebrenik. 2015. Perceptions of Diversity on Git Hub: A User Survey. In 2015 IEEE/ACM 8th International Workshop on Cooperative and Human Aspects of Software Engineering. 50–56. DOI: 10.1109/CHASE.2015.14
Dong Wang, Masanari Kondo, Yasutaka Kamei, Raula Gaikovina Kula, and Naoyasu Ubayashi. 2023. When conversations turn intowork: a taxonomy of converted discussions and issues in GitHub. Empirical Software Engineering 28, 6 (2023), 138.
StanleyWasserman and Katherine Faust. 1994. Social network analysis: Methods and applications. (1994).
Claes Wohlin, Per Runeson, Martin Höst, Magnus C Ohlsson, Björn Regnell, and Anders Wesslén. 2012. Experimentation in software engineering. Springer Science & Business Media.
Jiang Wu, Xiao Huang, and Bin Wang. 2023. Social-technical network effects in open source software communities: understanding the impacts of dependency networks on project success. Information Technology & People 36, 2 (2023), 895–915.
Jean-Gabriel Young, Amanda Casari, Katie McLaughlin, Milo Z Trujillo, Laurent Hébert-Dufresne, and James P Bagrow. 2021. Which contributions count? Analysis of attribution in open source. In 2021 IEEE/ACM 18th International Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR). IEEE, 242–253.
Minghui Zhou, Audris Mockus, Xiujuan Ma, Lu Zhang, and Hong Mei. 2016. Inflow and retention in oss communities with commercial involvement: A case study of three hybrid projects. ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology (TOSEM) 25, 2 (2016), 1–29.
Bernd Bruegge, Allen H. Dutoit, and Timo Wolf. 2006. Sysiphus: Enabling informal collaboration in global software development. In Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Global Software Engineering (ICGSE ’06). IEEE Computer Society, USA, 139–148.
Jenny Chen and Helena D Cooper-Thomas. 2023. Finding one’s own way: how newcomers who differ stay well. In Evidence-based HRM: a Global Forum for Empirical Scholarship, Vol. 11. Emerald Publishing Limited, 143–157.
Chia-Shang James Chu. 1995. Time series segmentation: A sliding window approach. Information Sciences 85, 1 (1995), 147–173. DOI: 10.1016/0020-0255(95)00021-G
Kevin Crowston, James Howison, and Hala Annabi. 2006. Information systems success in free and open source software development: Theory and measures. Software Process: Improvement and Practice 11, 2 (2006), 123–148.
Laura Dabbish, Colleen Stuart, Jason Tsay, and Jim Herbsleb. 2012. Social coding in GitHub: transparency and collaboration in an open software repository. In Proceedings of the ACM 2012 conference on computer supported cooperative work. 1277–1286.
Edson Dias, Paulo Meirelles, Fernando Castor, Igor Steinmacher, Igor Wiese, and Gustavo Pinto. 2021. What Makes a Great Maintainer of Open Source Projects?. In 2021 IEEE/ACM 43rd International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE). IEEE, Madrid, ES, 982–994. DOI: 10.1109/ICSE43902.2021.00093
Yvonne Dittrich and Rosalba Giuffrida. 2011. Exploring the Role of Instant Messaging in a Global Software Development Project. In 2011 IEEE Sixth International Conference on Global Software Engineering. 103–112. DOI: 10.1109/ICGSE.2011.21
Nadia Eghbal. 2020. Working in public: the making and maintenance of open source software. Stripe Press San Francisco, San Francisco, CA, USA.
Linton C. Freeman. 1978. Centrality in social networks conceptual clarification. Social Networks 1, 3 (1978), 215–239. DOI: 10.1016/0378-8733(78)90021-7
R Stuart Geiger, Dorothy Howard, and Lilly Irani. 2021. The labor of maintaining and scaling free and open-source software projects. Proceedings of the ACM on human-computer interaction 5, CSCW1 (2021), 1–28.
Hideaki Hata, Nicole Novielli, Sebastian Baltes, Raula Gaikovina Kula, and Christoph Treude. 2022. GitHub Discussions: An Exploratory Study of Early Adoption. Empirical Softw. Engg. 27, 1 (jan 2022), 32 pages. DOI: 10.1007/s10664-021-10058-6
Dongyang Hu, Tao Wang, Junsheng Chang, Gang Yin, and Yang Zhang. 2018. Multi-Discussing across Issues in GitHub: A Preliminary Study. In 2018 25th Asia-Pacific Software Engineering Conference (APSEC). 406–415. DOI: 10.1109/APSEC.2018.00055
Jack Jamieson, Eureka Foong, and Naomi Yamashita. 2022. Maintaining Values: Navigating Diverse Perspectives in Value-Charged Discussions in Open Source Development. Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact. 6, CSCW2, Article 449 (Nov. 2022), 28 pages. DOI: 10.1145/3555550
Yiqiao Jin, Yunsheng Bai, Yanqiao Zhu, Yizhou Sun, and Wei Wang. 2023. Code Recommendation for Open Source Software Developers. In Proceedings of the ACM Web Conference 2023 (Austin, TX, USA) (WWW ’23). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1324–1333. DOI: 10.1145/3543507.3583503
Eirini Kalliamvakou, Georgios Gousios, Kelly Blincoe, Leif Singer, Daniel M. German, and Daniela Damian. 2014. The promises and perils of mining GitHub. In Proceedings of the 11th Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories (Hyderabad, India) (MSR 2014). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 92–101. DOI: 10.1145/2597073.2597074
Marcia Lima, Igor Steinmacher, Denae Ford, Evangeline Liu, Grace Vorreuter, Tayana Conte, and Bruno Gadelha. 2023. Looking for related posts on GitHub discussions. PeerJ Computer Science 9 (2023), e1567.
Márcia Lima, Igor Steinmacher, Denae Ford, Grace Vorreuter, Ludimila Gonçalves, Tayana Conte, and Bruno Gadelha. 2025. How are discussions linked? A link analysis study on GitHub Discussions. Journal of Systems and Software 219 (2025), 112196.
Ana Maciel, Mairieli Wessel, Igor Wiese, and Igor Steinmacher. 2025. Replication package for this paper. [link]
Jennifer Marlow, Laura Dabbish, and Jim Herbsleb. 2013. Impression Formation in Online Peer Production: Activity Traces and Personal Profiles in Github. In Proceedings of the 2013 Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (San Antonio, Texas, USA). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 117–128.
Audris Mockus, Roy T Fielding, and James D Herbsleb. 2002. Two case studies of open source software development: Apache and Mozilla. ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology (TOSEM) 11, 3 (2002), 309–346.
Douglas C Montgomery, Elizabeth A Peck, and G Geoffrey Vining. 2021. Introduction to linear regression analysis. John Wiley & Sons.
Nachiappan Nagappan, Thomas Ball, and Andreas Zeller. 2006. Mining metrics to predict component failures. In Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Software Engineering (Shanghai, China) (ICSE ’06). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 452–461. DOI: 10.1145/1134285.1134349
Ifraz Rehman, Dong Wang, Raula Gaikovina Kula, Takashi Ishio, and Kenichi Matsumoto. 2020. Newcomer Candidate: Characterizing Contributions of a Novice Developer to GitHub. In 2020 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME). 855–855. DOI: 10.1109/ICSME46990.2020.00110
George AF Seber and Alan J Lee. 2012. Linear regression analysis. John Wiley & Sons.
Igor Steinmacher, Tayana Conte, Marco Aurélio Gerosa, and David Redmiles. 2015. Social Barriers Faced by Newcomers Placing Their First Contribution in Open Source Software Projects. In Proceedings of the 18th ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work; Social Computing (Vancouver, BC, Canada) (CSCW ’15). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1379–1392. DOI: 10.1145/2675133.2675215
Igor Steinmacher, Gustavo Pinto, Igor Scaliante Wiese, and Marco Aurélio Gerosa. 2018. Almost There: A Study on Quasi-Contributors in Open-Source Software Projects. In 2018 IEEE/ACM 40th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE). 256–266. DOI: 10.1145/3180155.3180208
Margaret-Anne Storey, Christoph Treude, Arie van Deursen, and Li-Te Cheng. 2010. The impact of social media on software engineering practices and tools. In Proceedings of the FSE/SDP Workshop on Future of Software Engineering Research (Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA) (FoSER ’10). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 359–364. DOI: 10.1145/1882362.1882435
Margaret-Anne Storey, Alexey Zagalsky, Fernando Figueira Filho, Leif Singer, and Daniel M. German. 2017. How Social and Communication Channels Shape and Challenge a Participatory Culture in Software Development. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering 43, 2 (2017), 185–204. DOI: 10.1109/TSE.2016.2584053
Bianca Trinkenreich, Mariam Guizani, Igor Wiese, Anita Sarma, and Igor Steinmacher. 2020. Hidden Figures: Roles and Pathways of Successful OSS Contributors. Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact. 4, CSCW2, Article 180 (2020), 22 pages. DOI: 10.1145/3415251
Jason Tsay, Laura Dabbish, and James Herbsleb. 2014. Let’s talk about it: evaluating contributions through discussion in GitHub. In Proceedings of the 22nd ACM SIGSOFT international symposium on foundations of software engineering. 144–154.
Bogdan Vasilescu, Vladimir Filkov, and Alexander Serebrenik. 2015. Perceptions of Diversity on Git Hub: A User Survey. In 2015 IEEE/ACM 8th International Workshop on Cooperative and Human Aspects of Software Engineering. 50–56. DOI: 10.1109/CHASE.2015.14
Dong Wang, Masanari Kondo, Yasutaka Kamei, Raula Gaikovina Kula, and Naoyasu Ubayashi. 2023. When conversations turn intowork: a taxonomy of converted discussions and issues in GitHub. Empirical Software Engineering 28, 6 (2023), 138.
StanleyWasserman and Katherine Faust. 1994. Social network analysis: Methods and applications. (1994).
Claes Wohlin, Per Runeson, Martin Höst, Magnus C Ohlsson, Björn Regnell, and Anders Wesslén. 2012. Experimentation in software engineering. Springer Science & Business Media.
Jiang Wu, Xiao Huang, and Bin Wang. 2023. Social-technical network effects in open source software communities: understanding the impacts of dependency networks on project success. Information Technology & People 36, 2 (2023), 895–915.
Jean-Gabriel Young, Amanda Casari, Katie McLaughlin, Milo Z Trujillo, Laurent Hébert-Dufresne, and James P Bagrow. 2021. Which contributions count? Analysis of attribution in open source. In 2021 IEEE/ACM 18th International Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR). IEEE, 242–253.
Minghui Zhou, Audris Mockus, Xiujuan Ma, Lu Zhang, and Hong Mei. 2016. Inflow and retention in oss communities with commercial involvement: A case study of three hybrid projects. ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology (TOSEM) 25, 2 (2016), 1–29.
Published
2025-09-22
How to Cite
MACIEL, Ana; WESSEL, Mairieli; WIESE, Igor; STEINMACHER, Igor.
Investigating the Impact of GitHub Discussions on Maintainers’ Workload and Community Dynamics. In: BRAZILIAN SYMPOSIUM ON SOFTWARE ENGINEERING (SBES), 39. , 2025, Recife/PE.
Anais [...].
Porto Alegre: Sociedade Brasileira de Computação,
2025
.
p. 37-47.
ISSN 2833-0633.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.5753/sbes.2025.9630.
