  Communication surrounding the development of an open source project largely
occurs outside the software repository itself. Historically, large communities
often used a collection of mailing lists to discuss the different aspects of
their projects. Multimodal tool use, with software development and
communication happening on different channels, complicates the study of open
source projects as a sociotechnical system. Here, we combine and standardize
mailing lists of the Python community, resulting in 954,287 messages from 1995
to the present. We share all scraping and cleaning code to facilitate
reproduction of this work, as well as smaller datasets for the Golang (122,721
messages), Angular (20,041 messages) and Node.js (12,514 messages) communities.
To showcase the usefulness of these data, we focus on the CPython repository
and merge the technical layer (which GitHub account works on what file and with
whom) with the social layer (messages from unique email addresses) by
identifying 33% of GitHub contributors in the mailing list data. We then
explore correlations between the valence of social messaging and the structure
of the collaboration network. We discuss how these data provide a laboratory to
test theories from standard organizational science in large open source
projects.
