Self-Organization Patterns in Wasp and Open Source Communities

In this paper, we conducted a comparative study of how social organization takes place in a wasp colony and OSS developer communities. Both these systems display similar global organization patterns, such as hierarchies and clear labor divisions. As our analysis shows, both systems also define interacting agent networks with similar common features that reflect limited information sharing among agents. As far as we know, this is the first research study analyzing the patterns and functional significance of these systems' weighted-interaction networks. By illuminating the extent to which self-organization is responsible for patterns such as hierarchical structure, we can gain insight into the origins of organization in OSS communities.