Geographical bias in GitHub : perceptions and reality

Abstract

Open source development has often been considered to be a level playing field for all developers. But there has been little work to investigate if bias plays any role in getting contributions accepted. The work presented in this study tries to understand the influence of geographical location on the evaluation of pull requests in GitHub - one of the primary open source development platforms. Using a mixed-methods approach that analyzes 70,000+ pull requests and 2,500+ survey responses, we find that geographical location explains statistically significant differences in pull request acceptance decisions. Compared to the United States, submitters from United Kingdom (22%), Canada (25%), Japan (40%), Netherlands (43%), and Switzerland (58%) have higher chances of getting their pull requests accepted. However, submitters from Germany (15%), Brazil (17%), China (24%), and Italy (19%) have lower chances of getting their pull requests accepted compared to the United States. The chances of pull request acceptance decisions increase by 19% when the submitter and integrator are from the same geographical location. Survey responses from submitters indicate the perception of bias is strong in Brazil and Italy matching our results. Also, 8 out of every 10 integrators feel that it is easy to work with submitters from the same geographical location.