The appropriation of GitHub for curation
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Human-Computer Interaction, Social Computing, Software Engineering
- Keywords
- Curation, GitHub, Appropriation
- Copyright
- © 2017 Wu et al.
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ Preprints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2017. The appropriation of GitHub for curation. PeerJ Preprints 5:e2952v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.2952v1
Abstract
Github is a key online collaborative software development environment. In this paper we describe a new category of Github project: Curation projects collect, evaluate, and preserve resources for software developers. We investigated 1) what motivates software developers to engaged in curation; 2) how software developers benefit from curation activities; and 3) how well GitHub supports/fails to support curation practices. We conducted in-depth interviews with 16 software developers each of whom host curation projects on GitHub. Our results suggest that software developers’ motivations for curation on GitHub are similar to their participation in open source projects. Convenient tools (e.g. Markdown syntax and Git version control system) and the opportunity to address professional needs of interests of large numbers of peers attract developers to engage in curation projects. Software developers benefit from curation projects through learning opportunities, support for development work, and professional interaction. However, curation is limited by GitHub’s document structure & format and also its lack of key features, such as search. We discuss design possibilities to encourage and improve curation appropriations of GitHub.
Author Comment
Our paper is among the first research efforts that attempt to understand why and how GitHub is appropriated for curation purposes. The in-depth analysis yields insights into software developers' motivations and experiences with such practice, and identifies current limitations.