Keeping track of a constantly updating stream of news items on social networking enabled software development sites may be difficult. We analyzed the actions of 544 GitHub.com developers working across 5,657 projects to examine how the network of developers and projects influence where developers choose to contribute. Our analyses revealed the existence of a group of extremely well connected developers, or rockstars. We found that these rockstars': 1) actions have a greater influence on their followers compared to regular developers, 2) type of action affect their followers differently, 3) influence on followers may depend on a project's age, 4) increased activity on a project increases activity by followers, and 5) followers use as guides to projects to work on. We discuss the implications of these findings to the design of software development environments.
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Lee et al. (2013) studied this question.
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