Converging Work-Talk Patterns in Online Task-Oriented Communities

Much of what we do is accomplished by working col-laboratively with others, and a large portion of our lives are spent working and talking; the patterns embodied in the alternation of working and talking can provide much useful insight into task-oriented social behaviors. The available electronic traces of the different kinds of hu-man activities in online communities are an empirical goldmine that can enable the holistic study and under-standing of these social systems. Open Source Soft-ware projects are prototypical examples of collabora-tive, task-oriented communities, depending on volun-teers for high-quality work. Here, we use sequence anal-ysis methods to identify the work-talk patterns of soft-ware developers in these online communities. We find that software developers prefer to persist in same kinds of activities, i.e., a string of work activities followed by a string of talk activities and so forth, rather than switch them frequently; this tendency strengthens with time, suggesting that developers become more ef-ficient, and can work longer with fewer interruptions. This process is accompanied by the formation of com-munity culture: developers ’ patterns in the same com-munities get closer with time while different commu-nities get relatively more different. The emergence of community culture is apparently driven by both “talk” and “work”. Finally, we also find that workers with good balance between “work ” and “talk ” tend to produce just as much work as those that focus strongly on “work”; however, the former appear to be more likely to continue to be active contributors in the communities.