Analyzing the open source communities' lifecycle with communication data

In this paper, we describe ongoing research on the lifecycle of Open Source communities. Our objective is to identify the quantitative characteristics of Open Source communities, which can allow determining their health and life expectation based on communication data from both developer and user mailing lists. We describe our hypotheses on the relation between metrics extracted from communication data and lifecycle stages. After having collected communication data from the Gmane.org server between 1998 and 2013 for 235 projects, we compare the various projects regarding in particular activity and collaboration. We thus propose to identify the healthiness phase of communities.