Create critique by Hongbo.md

posts/critique by Hongbo.md

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+I review the paper "Participation Inequality and the 90-9-1 Principle in Open Source" recently. Overall, the paper targets an interesting question, but what it really does is to answer a small part of it, which is not so satisying to read. I will break it down below.
+
+** Reasons to choose the paper **
+There are a couple of reasons why I choose the paper, firstly, 
+
+** Description of problem **
+
+   Sustainability of GitHub project is an important and unsolved problem for open source software community. 
+   Usually projects rely on a large community of users voluntter to contribute and lack of contribution causes major loss in the real world like "the HeartBleed instance". 
+   Because of the voluntary nature of open source contribution, volunteer dilemma and common poor theory states users may not actively
+contribute becuase they think "others will do". Reported online content creation field, the shared responsibility may lead to a "90-9-1 principle" , 
+which states 90% of users never contribute back, 9% of users make minor contribution and the rest 1% users make the majority.
+Quantifying the extent of which this principle applies in open source world and 
+what is the extent of contribution equality in oss is important for the understanding of open source development activity and studying the sustainability of open source projects.
+
+** Main research questions **
+   The question are three-folded:
+
+      a) Do open source software developers exhibit participation inequality in their contributions
+      b) Do open source software projects suffer from partici-pation inequality?
+      c) Does the popularity of an open source software project affect participation inequality?
+
+** Overview of study design / methods **
+   Users can perform differen actions (or operations) on GitHub. Authors manually code those actions into three categories: 
+
+      a) WATCH(only passive event)
+      b) INTERACT(weakly active event)
+      c) CONTRIBUTE(active event). 
+
+   Authors collect user action record and project level information from GHArchive data, and create three datasets:
+
+      a) Random user set, where they randomly sample users from the complete data and collect their asscoiated projects.
+      b) Random project set, where they randomly sample projects from the complete data.
+      c) Popular project set, where they select the 500 most popular projects from the complete data.
+
+   They caclualte the distribution of each action category in the three dataset.
+
+
+** Critique **
+    * What's the authors' likely philosophical stance? *
+         I would think they are "Positivist", as they start from common-pool resource and voluntter-contribution theory and expect this theory can "predict" what's happening in oss.
+    * How well structured is the literature review? Is there a clear gap / hook? What are they? *
+         The literature reviews starts from the lituracy of contribution inequality in other fields like Twitter and Wikipedia, where a 90-9-1 principle is reported.
+         And it describes how researchers in oss community study contribution inequality: two major directions are introduced, one focus on the inequality of non-coding activity like 
+         user activity on project mailing-list, the other focuses on inequality of coding contribution.
+         According to the author, this paper introduces "90-9-1" principle into oss field and measure the inequality based on the type of action, not the amount of contribution.
+         I think this paper doesn't do a good job of explaining why it's needed to measure inequality based on actions, and what benefit does bring "90-9-1" principle into oss better
+         than the concept previously studies in oss (e.g. core team VS non core team). Adding descriptions about what are the problems unsolved/unanswered with inequality measured by 
+         contribution size, and what might be the value of introducing inequality metrics with action type benefit the research community.
+    * What are the strengths and weaknesses of the study design and research methods, as best you can tell? *
+   Strength: 
+
+            + Writing is clear and easy to read.
+            + Provide detailed coding protocal on how to code actions into types, and the reasoning behind the coding.
+            + The method is simple to operate and replicate
+
+
+   Weakness:
+
+            - The method is not complicated enough to provide a deep insight.
+
+
+   * Do the authors use theory? How? *
+       Yes, the authors referred to the theory of common pool resource and voluntter contribution. They use the theory to infer how might inequality of contribution be like in oss, 
+       which helps them to construct research questions and hypothesis in the study.
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