The usefulness of Twitter for open source developers as a feedback tool for the success of their projects

Ivor Van Der Schalk, Zaki Abdurrahman Koesoemahardja, Slinger Jansen

    Research output: Contribution to journalConference articleAcademicpeer-review

    Abstract

    This paper analyzes correlations between success indicators of Open Source projects and Twitter posts containing emotional signals on such projects. Within a timeframe of two years (February 1st 2014 - January 31st 2016), 61,570 Twitter posts containing names of Open Source projects were collected. These posts were classified into positive or negative signals based on their content. For instance, posts that contain the terms "happy", "love", "fun", "good", "bad", "sad" and "unhappy" represent positive or negative emotional signals. The purpose of this research is to find whether or not people express their feelings about Open Source projects on Twitter and to determine if these feelings are an indication of how successful an Open Source project is. This is interesting because this enables Open Source developers to use Twitter to get reliable feedback from their users about their projects. Among the aspects that are explored in this research are the number of tweets containing positive signals, number of tweets containing negative signals and the number of downloads of Open Source projects.

    Original languageEnglish
    Pages (from-to)25-38
    Number of pages14
    JournalCEUR Workshop Proceedings
    Volume1808
    Publication statusPublished - 2016
    Event2016 International Workshop on Software Ecosystems, IWSECO 2016 - Dublin, Ireland
    Duration: 10 Dec 2016 → …

    Keywords

    • Open source project
    • Sentiment classification
    • Twitter

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