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\section{Introduction}
\label{sec:intro}
\emph{Gender diversity}, or more often its lack thereof, among participants to
software development activities has been thoroughly studied in recent years. In
particular, the presence of, effects of, and countermeasures for \emph{gender
bias} in Free/Open Source Software (FOSS) have received a lot of attention
over the past decade~\cite{david2008fossdevs, qiu2010kdewomen,
nafus2012patches, kuechler2012genderfoss, vasilescu2014gender,
oneil2016debiansurvey, robles2016womeninfoss, terrell2017gender,
zacchiroli2021gender}. \emph{Geographic diversity} is on the other hand the
kind of diversity that stems from participants in some global activity coming
from different world regions and cultures.
Geographic diversity in FOSS has received relatively little attention in scholarly
works. In particular, while seminal survey-based and
point-in-time medium-scale studies of the geographic origins of FOSS
contributors exist~\cite{ghosh2005understanding, david2008fossdevs,
barahona2008geodiversity, takhteyev2010ossgeography, robles2014surveydataset,
wachs2021ossgeography}, large-scale longitudinal studies of the geographic
origin of FOSS contributors are still lacking. Such a quantitative
characterization would be useful to inform decisions related to global
development teams~\cite{herbsleb2007globalsweng} and hiring strategies in the
information technology (IT) market, as well as contribute factual information
to the debates on the economic impact and sociology of FOSS around the world.
\paragraph{Contributions}
With this work we contribute to close this gap by conducting \textbf{the first
longitudinal study of the geographic origin of contributors to public code
over 50 years.} Specifically, we provide a preliminary answer to the
following research question:
\begin{researchquestion}
From which world regions do authors of publicly available commits come from
and how has it changed over the past 50 years?
\label{rq:geodiversity}
\end{researchquestion}
We use as dataset the \SWH/ archive~\cite{swhipres2017} and analyze from it
2.2 billion\xspace commits archived from 160 million\xspace projects and authored by
43 million\xspace authors during the 1971--2021 time period.
We geolocate developers to
\DATAWorldRegions/ world regions, using as signals email country code top-level domains (ccTLDs) and
author (first/last) names compared with name distributions around the world, and UTC offsets
mined from commit metadata.
We find evidence of the early dominance of North America in open source
software, later joined by Europe. After that period, the geographic diversity
in public code has been constantly increasing.
We also identify relevant historical shifts
related to the end of the UNIX wars and the increase of coding literacy in
Central and South Asia, as well as of broader phenomena like colonialism and
people movement across countries (immigration/emigration).
\paragraph{Data availability.}
A replication package for this paper is available from Zenodo at
\url{https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6390355}~\cite{replication-package}.
\section{Related Work}
\label{sec:related}
Both early and recent works~\cite{ghosh2005understanding, david2008fossdevs,
robles2014surveydataset, oneil2016debiansurvey} have characterized the
geography of Free/Open Source Software (FOSS) using \emph{developer surveys},
which provide high-quality answers but are limited in size (2-5\,K developers)
and can be biased by participant sampling.
In 2008 Barahona et al.~\cite{barahona2008geodiversity} conducted a seminal
large-scale (for the time) study on FOSS \emph{geography using mining software
repositories (MSR) techniques}. They analyzed the origin of 1\,M contributors
using the SourceForge user database and mailing list archives over the
1999--2005 period, using as signals information similar to ours: email domains
and UTC offsets.
The studied period (7 years) in~\cite{barahona2008geodiversity} is shorter than
what is studied in the present paper (50 years) and the data sources are
largely different; with that in mind, our results show a slightly larger quote of
European v.~North American contributions.
Another empirical work from 2010 by Takhteyev and
Hilts~\cite{takhteyev2010ossgeography} harvested self-declared geographic
locations of GitHub accounts recursively following their connections,
collecting information for $\approx$\,70\,K GitHub users. A very recent
work~\cite{wachs2021ossgeography} by Wachs et al.~has geolocated half a million
GitHub users, having contributed at least 100 commits each, and who
self-declare locations on their GitHub profiles. While the study is
point-in-time as of 2021, the authors compare their findings
against~\cite{barahona2008geodiversity, takhteyev2010ossgeography} to
characterize the evolution of FOSS geography over the time snapshots taken by
the three studies.
Compared with previous empirical works, our study is much larger scale---having
analyzed 43 million\xspace authors of 2.2 billion\xspace commits from 160 million\xspace
projects---longitudinal over 50 years of public code contributions rather than
point in time, and also more fine-grained (with year-by-year granularity over
the observed period). Methodologically, our study relies on Version Control

TokenMonster Datasets: English, Code, Fiction, Non-fiction

Included are datasets that were used to generate the TokenMonster pre-built vocabularies. All are raw text files.

The training data mostly came from Red Pajamas 1B Token Sample. However, to reduce formal English and emphasize other languages, informal writing and code, c4_sample & cc_sample were cropped to 100MB, and Reddit conversations data were added (also cropped to 100MB.)

Additionally, equally weighted code samples of 2MB per language (code_2mb) and 10MB per language (code_10mb) were added for 30 different programming languages to ensure all programming languages have representation. The source of the code samples was codeparrot/github-code. To ensure a range of coding styles, I allowed only 1 file per GitHub repository, and per file a maximum of 200 lines selected from the middle of the file.

Given the evolving nature of writing styles, I felt that book_sample.txt, which consists of out-of-copyright books, was not a good representation of contemporary fiction. To better represent a more modern style, I curated fiction.txt and fiction_100mb.txt by throwing together a few other datasets and cleaning it up.

Filename Filesize
arxiv_sample.txt 88,925,569
book_sample.txt 108,069,616
c4_sample.txt 100,560,318
cc_2023-06_sample.txt 100,852,231
code_2mb.txt 62,895,904
code_10mb.txt 314,006,799
fiction.txt 357,119,086
fiction_100mb.txt 94,235,489
github_sample.txt 191,123,094
stackexchange_sample.txt 71,940,138
wikipedia_sample.txt 79,181,873
reddit.txt 100,027,565

Note: fiction_100mb.txt is a subset of fiction.txt, and code_2mb.txt is a subset of code_10mb.txt.

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