Towards mining norms in open source software repositories

Abstract

The concept of norms has attracted a lot of interest in various disciplines including computer science since it facilitates collaboration and cooperation of individuals in societies. Extracting norms from computer-mediated human interactions is gaining popularity since huge volume of data is available from which norms can be extracted or “mined”. The emerging open source communities offer exciting new application opportunities for norms mining since such communities involve collaboration and cooperation among developers from different geographical regions, background and cultures. Mining norms from open source projects however has not received much attention from the normative multi-agent system community. Therefore, our position paper addresses this issue by discussing the opportunities and the challenges presented by this domain for the study of norms. It provides a brief description of existing technologies in mining software repositories (MSR) that can be leveraged. In addition, it highlights the motivations for the study of normative behaviour in open source software development from the data available in various software repositories. On this basis, it lays out the main research questions and open challenges in mining norms from these repositories.