  Popular and large contemporary open-source projects now embrace a diverse set
of documentation for communication channels. Examples include contribution
guidelines (i.e., commit message guidelines, coding rules, submission
guidelines), code of conduct (i.e., rules and behavior expectations),
governance policies, and Q&A forum. In 2020, GitHub released Discussion to
distinguish between communication and collaboration. However, it remains
unclear how developers maintain these channels, how trivial it is, and whether
deciding on conversion takes time. We conducted an empirical study on 259 NPM
and 148 PyPI repositories, devising two taxonomies of reasons for converting
discussions into issues and vice-versa. The most frequent conversion from a
discussion to an issue is when developers request a contributor to clarify
their idea into an issue (Reporting a Clarification Request -35.1% and 34.7%,
respectively), while agreeing that having non actionable topic (QA, ideas,
feature requests -55.0% and 42.0%, respectively}) is the most frequent reason
of converting an issue into a discussion. Furthermore, we show that not all
reasons for conversion are trivial (e.g., not a bug), and raising a conversion
intent potentially takes time (i.e., a median of 15.2 and 35.1 hours,
respectively, taken from issues to discussions). Our work contributes to
complementing the GitHub guidelines and helping developers effectively utilize
the Issue and Discussion communication channels to maintain their
collaboration.
