Understanding oss as a self-organizing process

Submitted by msquire on Thu, 2011-04-21 10:32

Title	Understanding oss as a self-organizing process
Publication Type	Conference Paper
Year of Publication	2002
Authors	Madey, G, Freeh, V, Tynan, R
Secondary Title	In The 2nd Workshop on Open Source Software Engineering at the 24th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE2002
Keywords	developers, size, social network analysis, social networks, sourceforge
Abstract	We hypothesize that open source software development can be modeled as self-organizing, collaboration, social networks. We analyze structural data on over 39,000 open source projects hosted at SourceForge.net. We define two software developers to be connected — part of a collaboration social network — if they are members of the same project, or are connected by a chain of connected developers. Project sizes, developer project participation, and clusters of connected developers are analyzed. We find evidence to support our hypothesis, primarily in the presence of power-law relationships on project sizes (number of developers per project), project membership (number of projects joined by a developer), and cluster sizes.
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