Tweeting a Help Wanted Sign

CMU research shows Twitter drives popularity, contributors to open-source software. Want to be popular with lots of friends? Get out there and tweet. That advice holds true for open-source software projects as well, according to a new study from researchers in the Carnegie Mellon University School of Computer Science. Led by Hongbo Fang, a Ph.D. candidate in the Institute for Software Research's (ISR) Societal Computing program , the research team found that Twitter is an effective way to attract more attention and more contributors to open-source projects on GitHub. Fang presented the study, "' This Is Damn Slick!' Estimating the Impact of Tweets on Open-Source Project Popularity and New Contributors ," at the International Conference on Software Engineering, where the research won a Distinguished Paper Award. The study showed that tweeting about a project produced on average a 7% increase in popularity - at least one star on GitHub - and generated a 2% increase in the number of contributors.