A Quantitative Study of Social Organisation in Open Source Software Communities
This work addresses the need for resilience and risk indicators in open source software communities, but it is incremental as it applies existing network methods to new data.
The study analyzed the social organization of 14 major open source software communities using network analytics to quantify aspects like cohesiveness and resilience, revealing differences across communities and proposing indicators for risk assessment.
The success of open source projects crucially depends on the voluntary contributions of a sufficiently large community of users. Apart from the mere size of the community, interesting questions arise when looking at the evolution of structural features of collaborations between community members. In this article, we discuss several network analytic proxies that can be used to quantify different aspects of the social organisation in social collaboration networks. We particularly focus on measures that can be related to the cohesiveness of the communities, the distribution of responsibilities and the resilience against turnover of community members. We present a comparative analysis on a large-scale dataset that covers the full history of collaborations between users of 14 major open source software communities. Our analysis covers both aggregate and time-evolving measures and highlights differences in the social organisation across communities. We argue that our results are a promising step towards the definition of suitable, potentially multi-dimensional, resilience and risk indicators for open source software communities.