On the use of Internet Relay Chat (IRC) meetings by developers of the GNOME GTK+ project
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Developers of open source projects are distributed across the world. They rely on email, mailing lists, instant messaging, IRC channels and more recently IRC meetings to communicate. Most of the studies thus far focus on the use of mailing lists by OSS developers, however, an increasing number of open source projects are using IRC meetings to hold developer meetings. In this paper, we mine the #gtk-devel IRC meeting channel and study the usage of the IRC meetings held by the GNOME GTK+ core developers and maintainers. We look at three different dimensions: the discussion volume of the meetings, the number of participants attending the meetings and the activity of these participants. Our findings show that IRC meetings are gaining popularity among open source developers and maintainers: the IRC meeting discussions are increasing in volume, have increasing attendance levels, and the participants actively contribute to the meetings. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study on the use of developer IRC meetings by OSS developers.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.007 | 0.065 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".