Identifying Emergent Leadership in Open Source Software Projects Based on Communication Styles

In open source software (OSS) communities, existing leadership indicators are dominantly measured by code contribution or community influence. Recent studies on emergent leadership shed light on additional dimensions such as intellectual stimulation in collaborative communications. This paper aims to mine communication styles and identify emergent leadership behaviors in OSS communities, using issue comments data. We start with the construction of 6 categories of leadership behaviors based on existing leadership studies. Then, we manually label leadership behaviors in 10,000 issue comments from 10 OSS projects, and extract 304 heuristic linguistic patterns which represent different types of emergent leadership behaviors in flexible and concise manners. Next, an automated algorithm is developed to merge and consolidate different pattern sets extracted from multiple projects into a final pattern ranking list, which can be applied for the automatic leadership identification. The evaluation results show that iLead can achieve a median precision of 0.82 and recall of 0.78, outperforming ten machine/deep learning baselines. We argue that emergent leadership behaviors in issue discussion should be taken into consideration to broaden existing OSS leadership viewpoints.