The document discusses analyzing the social aspects of open source software ecosystems by studying software evolution over time. Specifically, it aims to analyze how social factors like community interactions, structures, and processes coevolve with the software product and process. The researchers plan to mine data from various open source project repositories, select appropriate projects, and use frameworks like Herdsman and FLOSSMetrics to extract and merge identity data, perform statistical analysis and visualization. This will help understand success factors for open source projects and identify best practices.