Hacking Alone? The Effects of Online and Offline Participation on Open Source Community Leadership

Research on computer mediated communication has examined how a lack of social presence affects participation, communication and leadership in online groups, but until recently, has not examined offline relations or emergent social structures. The few studies examining these issues have not been integrated with research on open source communities. Online communities producing open source software face even greater problems of governance than affinity or interest based online communities, as leadership responsibilities extend beyond mailing list management to managing release dates, public relations, and collaborations with firms. With data from one open source community's online and offline networks over three consecutive years, we assess factors affecting voting participation and leadership. We find that the more developers one has met face to face, the more likely one was to vote in a leadership election. Controlling for contributions of code, developers are more likely to hold a top leadership position when they participate more in online discussions. However, online participation in technical discussions did not affect leadership as much as occupying a structurally advantaged position in the community's social network. We conclude with theoretical implications that consider the dynamics of online and offline networks for governing distributed online communities.