Understanding how GitHub supports curation repositories

Abstract

In recent years, software developers have started to appropriate GitHub repositories to curate resources, in order to systematically select, evaluate, and organize existing artifacts for preservation and future use. Curation behaviors in social media sites, such as users' experiences to curate tweets from Twitter and pins on Pinterest, are well documented. However, GitHub, as a social coding platform, presents a new context for this activity, raising questions about the nature of curation on this task-driven online work site. To explore and understand curation on GitHub, we compared and contrasted curation repositories with software repositories using activity logs and analyzed the content of popular curation repositories. Our results show that: (1) curation repositories have become a favorite category of repositories in GitHub; (2) curation repositories leverage collaborative features and practices native to GitHub in new ways; (3) curation repositories collect and preserve high-quality resources for the software developers' community. Our results suggest that curation is becoming increasingly important to the software developers' community, and current practices can be better supported with tools designed specifically for curation.