The Unsolvable Problem or the Unheard Answer? A Dataset of 24, 669 Open-Source Software Conference Talks

Kimberly Truong, Courtney Miller, Bogdan Vasilescu, Christian Kästner

Abstract: Talks at practitioner-focused open-source software conferences are a valuable source of information for software engineering researchers. They provide a pulse of the community and are valuable source material for grey literature analysis. We curated a dataset of 24,669 talks from 87 open-source conferences between 2010 and 2021. We stored all relevant metadata from these conferences and provide scripts to collect the transcripts. We believe this data is useful for answering many kinds of questions, such as: What are the important/highly discussed topics within practitioner communities? How do practitioners interact? And how do they present themselves to the public? We demonstrate the usefulness of this data by reporting our findings from two small studies: a topic model analysis providing an overview of open-source community dynamics since 2011 and a qualitative analysis of a smaller community-oriented sample within our dataset to gain a better understanding of why contributors leave open-source software.