A Longitudinal Study on Collaboration Networks and Decision to Participate in a FLOSS Community

In this paper we conjecture that individual decisions of FLOSS (Free/Libre Open Source Software) developers to take on a task are influenced by network relations generated by collaboration among project members. In order to explore our conjecture we collected data on a FLOSS project team consisting of 227 developers committed since 2002 to the development of a web browser. We reconstructed 2-mode co- collaboration networks (software developer by bug) in which a tie represents an action taken by a developer in order to solve a specific bug. Co-collaboration networks were collected at five points in time during a six-month development cycle of the software. We report and discuss results of longitudinal actor-based modeling that we specify to test for the influence of local network structures on developer’s decision to take action on a specific bug. The study controls for bug-specific and developer-specific characteristics that may also affect developers’ decisions exogenously. We also control for priority and severity levels assigned by the team to bugs in an attempt to manage voluntary contribution.