Studying social collaboration features and patterns in service crowdsourcing

Abstract

Service crowdsourcing follows typical social collaboration processes with stochastic and dynamic characteristics. In this paper, the “bug-fix” social collaboration on GitHub is used as a case scenario of crowdsourcing, and 53,475 issues in 10 OSS projects are collected to conduct an empirical study on features and patterns of service crowdsourcing. Seven collaboration features (CFs) are proposed to delineate social characteristics of crowdsourcing. In terms of these CFs, social collaboration processes are clustered and results show that these features have significant distinguishability. An extended Generalized Sequential Pattern (GSP) algorithm is put forward to identify two types of collaboration patterns called participant-oriented pattern (PP) and role-oriented pattern (RP), and the richness and individualized degree of collaboration patterns in different OSS projects are analyzed and compared.