  Contributors to open source software (OSS) communities assume diverse roles
to take different responsibilities. One major limitation of the current OSS
tools and platforms is that they provide a uniform user interface regardless of
the activities performed by the various types of contributors. This paper
serves as a non-trivial first step towards resolving this challenge by
demonstrating a methodology and establishing knowledge to understand how the
contributors' roles and their dynamics, reflected in the activities
contributors perform, are exhibited in OSS communities. Based on an analysis of
user action data from 29 GitHub projects, we extracted six activities that
distinguished four Active roles and five Supporting roles of OSS contributors,
as well as patterns in role changes. Through the lens of the Activity Theory,
these findings provided rich design guidelines for OSS tools to support diverse
contributor roles.
