Analysing the evolution of social aspects of open source software ecosystems

Empirical software engineering is concerned with statistical studies that aim to understand and improve certain aspects of the soft- ware development process. Many of these focus on the evolution and maintenance of evolving software projects. They rely on repository min- ing techniques to extract relevant data from software repositories or other data sources frequently used by software developers. We enlarge these empirical studies by exploring social software engineering, study- ing the developer community, including the way developers work, coop- erate, communicate and share information. The underlying hypothesis is that social aspects significantly influence the way in which the software project will evolve over time. We present some preliminary results of an empirical study we are carrying out on the different types of activities of the community involved in the GNOME open source ecosystem, and we discuss suggestions for future work.