Responsiveness and Participation-Wheels of a Chariot ! !

Motivation and active participation from developers is crucial to drive a project. Previous research on developer motivation demonstrates that project environment plays an important role in continued participation, withdrawal and dropout. Attributes like indifference to developer interaction and timeliness of responses influences participation. We study GitHub projects and define several parameters indicating participation such as number of forks, commits, pull requests, pull requests merged, pull request comments, distinct head repositories, commit comments, issues project members. We define several parameters indicating responsiveness such as mean time to close a pull request, merge a pull request, repair a bug and time to first comment on a pull request. We conduct a series of experiments to investigate if participation and responsiveness are correlated and experimental results on GitHub dataset demonstrate association between participation and responsiveness.