Their article appears in the edited volume "Open Source Systems: Adoption and Impact" following the 10th International Conference on Open Source Systems held in Florence, Italy
Professor of Computing Sciences Megan Squire and alumna Amber K. Smith ’14 published “The Diffusion of Pastebin Tools to Enhance Communication in FLOSS Mailing Lists” at the 2015 International Conference on Open Source Systems, held at the Fiera Firenze (Florence, Italy) May 16-17, 2015.
This paper described how a new invention, the “pastebin,” is used to streamline software developer communications. They collected data about how several dozen pastebin tools were used on 9,000 email mailing lists to determine that pastebin adoption followed the traditional S-curve of classic Diffusion of Innovation (DoI) theory. In addition, they revealed how adoption of the innovation differed between variants of the tool, and how and why some sub-communities rejected the innovation.
The full citation of the paper follows:
Squire, M. and Smith, A. (2015). The diffusion of pastebin tools to enhance communication in FLOSS mailing lists. In Damiani, E., F. Flavi, D. Riehle, A. Wasserman (Eds.) Open Source Systems: Adoption and Impact (Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Open Source Systems OSS2015). IFIP. Florence, Italy. May 16. 45-57. [preprint link]