  Interactions between individuals and their participation in community
activities are governed by how individuals identify themselves with their
peers. We want to investigate such behavior for developers while they are
learning and contributing on socially collaborative environments, specifically
code hosting sites and question/answer sites. In this study, we investigate the
following questions about advocates, developers who can be identified as
well-rounded community contributors and active learners. Do advocates flock
together in a community? How do flocks of advocates migrate within a community?
Do these flocks of advocates migrate beyond a single community? To understand
such behavior, we collected 12,578 common advocates across a code hosting site
- GitHub and a question/answering site - Stack Overflow. These advocates were
involved in 1,549 projects on GitHub and were actively asking 114,569 questions
and responding 408,858 answers and 1,001,125 comments on Stack Overflow. We
performed an in-depth empirical analysis using social networks to find the
flocks of advocates and their migratory pattern on GitHub, Stack Overflow, and
across both communities. We found that 7.5% of the advocates create flocks on
GitHub and 8.7% on Stack Overflow. Further, these flocks of advocates migrate
on an average of 5 times on GitHub and 2 times on Stack Overflow. In
particular, advocates in flocks of two migrate more frequently than larger
flocks. However, this migration behavior was only common within a single
community. Our findings indicate that advocates' flocking and migration
behavior differs substantially from the ones found in other social
environments. This suggests a need to investigate the factors that demotivate
the flocking and migration behavior of advocates and ways to enhance and
integrate support for such behavior in collaborative software tools.
