Abstract

In this presentation, we will summarize some emerging methods used to characterize problems (i.e., “community smells”) that open-source software communities face which will affect their sustainability. We will describe the type of information that can be extracted from community analysis tools that analyze GitHub repositories and present the results of running one such diagnostic tool on several open repositories projects: DSpace, Dataverse, EPrints, Islandora, Samvera, Archivematica, and OJS. The motivating objective for this work is to understand if tools can be used by libraries to better understand the open source communities that they rely on, and ultimately, to use that understanding to help address existing issues or to make strategic decisions about adoption.