  Interpersonal trust plays a crucial role in facilitating collaborative tasks,
such as software development. While previous research recognizes the
significance of trust in an organizational setting, there is a lack of
understanding in how trust is exhibited in OSS distributed teams, where there
is an absence of direct, in-person communications. To foster trust and
collaboration in OSS teams, we need to understand what trust is and how it is
exhibited in written developer communications (e.g., pull requests, chats). In
this paper, we first investigate various dimensions of trust to identify the
ways trusting behavior can be observed in OSS. Next, we sample a set of 100
GitHub pull requests from Apache Software Foundation (ASF) projects, to analyze
and demonstrate how each dimension of trust can be exhibited. Our findings
provide preliminary insights into cues that might be helpful to automatically
assess team dynamics and establish interpersonal trust in OSS teams, leading to
successful and sustainable OSS.
