The paper “Mining a Decade of Event Impacts on Contributor Dynamics in Ethereum: A Longitudinal Study”, co-authored by Matteo Vaccargiu, Dr Rumyana Neykova, Dr Giuseppe Destefanis and from the Department of Computer Science, received the ‘FOSS Impact’ Award at the IEEE/ACM Mining Software Repositories 2025 conference (MSR 2025) in Ottawa, Canada.
MSR (https://2025.msrconf.org) is a top conference in the fields of software engineering and data mining. The award recognizes the paper’s reproducible methodology, which combines survival analysis, network modeling, and statistical methods to examine how open-source communities respond to disruptions over time. The paper analyzes a large dataset comprising ten years of contribution activity from GitHub related to the Ethereum ecosystem, tracking how collaboration patterns and contributor retention shift in response to major events. In addition, the study supports FOSS maintainers and contributors in understanding the impact of changes such as feature rollouts or market fluctuations on team structure, workload distribution, and sustained engagement.
This study is an international collaboration led by Brunel, in collaboration with UCL (Sabrina Aufiero and Dr Silvia Bartolucci), Queen Mary (Cheick Ba and Dr Richard Clegg), University of Hohenheim, Germany (Prof. Daniel Graziotin), and University of Cagliari, Italy (Prof. Roberto Tonelli).
The preprint of the paper is available here: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.05054.