Impact of Social Ties on Open Source Project Team Formation

TitleImpact of Social Ties on Open Source Project Team Formation
Publication TypeConference Paper
Year of Publication2006
AuthorsHahn, J, Moon, J, Zhang, C
Secondary TitleOSS2006: Open Source Systems (IFIP 2.13)
Volume203/2006
Pagination307 - 317
Date Published2006///
PublisherSpringer
ISSN Number978-0-387-34225-2
Keywordsdevelopers, metadata, social network analysis, sourceforge
Abstract

In this paper, we empirically examined the role of social ties in OSSD team formation and developer joining behavior. We find that the existence and the amount of prior social relations in the network do increase the probability of an OSS project to attract more developers. Interestingly, for projects without preexisting social ties, developers tend to join the project initiated by people with less OSSD experience. This research fills a gap in the open source literature by conducting an empirical investigation of the role of social relations on project team formation behavior. Furthermore, the adoption of social network analysis, which has received little attention in the OSS literature, can yield some interesting results on the interactions among OSS developers.

Notes

"we randomly selected 1030 new projects that were registered between X and X in 2005. A web crawler downloaded the HTML files containing project summary data and developer information on the date of registration."

DOI10.1007/0-387-34226-5_31
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