MODELING DISTRIBUTED COLLABORATION ON GITHUB

In this paper, we apply concepts from Distributed Leadership, a theory suggesting that leadership is shared among members of an organization, to frame models of contribution that we uncover in five relatively successful open source software (OSS) projects hosted on GitHub. In this qualitative, comparative case study, we show how these projects make use of GitHub features such as pull requests (PRs). We find that projects in which member PRs are more frequently merged with the codebase experience more sustained participation. We also find that projects with higher success rates among contributors and higher contributor retention tend to have more distributed (non-centralized) practices for reviewing and processing PRs. The relationships between organizational form and GitHub practices are enabled and made visible as a result of GitHub's novel interface. Our results demonstrate specific dimensions along which these projects differ and explicate a framework that warrants testing in future studies of OSS, particularly GitHub.