Abstract

This study incorporates the concepts of transparency, innovation, and collaboration within a broader analytic lens of trust-building infrastructure and applies that lens to an examination of the use of GitHub by 124 prominent news outlets over more than a decade. It finds that (a) their use of GitHub is not widespread but several outlets do actively use it; (b) they use GitHub to open-source a mixture of technologies and journalistic materials; (c) their introductory project documentation routinely includes at least partial amounts of both ambient and disclosure forms of transparency, but rarely exhibits participatory transparency; (d) collaboration is almost non-existent in the vast majority of their repositories; and (e) there has been a decline in their use of GitHub and the collaboration affordances within their repositories in recent years. The study extends the transparency literature by adapting key concepts to journalism-adjacent infrastructure and offers empirical evidence about the innovativeness of open-source technologies originating from prominent news organizations and the amount of collaboration that occurs around them. This builds to an intervention that raises some questions about the direct impact of open-source repositories as trust-building infrastructure while drawing attention to less-considered but nevertheless useful performative functions that such infrastructure enables.

摘要

本研究将透明度、创新和协作的概念纳入了更广泛的信任建设基础设施分析镜头，并将该镜头应用于检查 124 家知名新闻媒体十多年来对 GitHub 的使用情况。它发现 (a) 他们对 GitHub 的使用并不广泛，但有几个网点确实在积极使用它；(b) 他们使用 GitHub 开源混合技术和新闻材料；(c) 他们的介绍性项目文件通常至少包括部分环境和披露形式的透明度，但很少展示参与式透明度；(d) 在他们的绝大多数存储库中几乎不存在协作；(e) 近年来，他们对 GitHub 和存储库中协作功能的使用有所下降。该研究通过将关键概念应用于与新闻业相邻的基础设施来扩展透明度文献，并提供有关源自著名新闻机构的开源技术的创新性以及围绕它们发生的合作数量的经验证据。这建立了一种干预措施，提出了一些关于开源存储库作为建立信任的基础设施的直接影响的问题，同时提请人们注意这种基础设施所支持的较少考虑但仍然有用的执行功能。