License: Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license (CC BY 3.0)
When quoting this document, please refer to the following
DOI: 10.4230/OASIcs.ICCSW.2012.116
URN: urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-37748
URL: http://dagstuhl.sunsite.rwth-aachen.de/volltexte/2012/3774/
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Serrano Zanetti, Marcelo ; Sarigöl, Emre ; Scholtes, Ingo ; Tessone, Claudio Juan ; Schweitzer, Frank

A Quantitative Study of Social Organisation in Open Source Software Communities

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Abstract

The success of open source projects crucially depends on the voluntary contributions of a sufficiently large community of users. Apart from the mere size of the community, interesting questions arise when looking at the evolution of structural features of collaborations between community members. In this article, we discuss several network analytic proxies that can be used to quantify different aspects of the social organisation in social collaboration networks. We particularly focus on measures that can be related to the cohesiveness of the communities, the distribution of responsibilities and the resilience against turnover of community members. We present a comparative analysis on a large-scale dataset that covers the full history of collaborations between users of $14$ major open source software communities. Our analysis covers both aggregate and time-evolving measures and highlights differences in the social organisation across communities. We argue that our results are a promising step towards the definition of suitable, potentially multi-dimensional, resilience and risk indicators for open source software communities.

BibTeX - Entry

@InProceedings{serranozanetti_et_al:OASIcs:2012:3774,
  author =	{Marcelo Serrano Zanetti and Emre Sarig{\"o}l and Ingo Scholtes and Claudio Juan Tessone and Frank Schweitzer},
  title =	{{A Quantitative Study of Social Organisation in Open Source Software Communities}},
  booktitle =	{2012 Imperial College Computing Student Workshop},
  pages =	{116--122},
  series =	{OpenAccess Series in Informatics (OASIcs)},
  ISBN =	{978-3-939897-48-4},
  ISSN =	{2190-6807},
  year =	{2012},
  volume =	{28},
  editor =	{Andrew V. Jones},
  publisher =	{Schloss Dagstuhl--Leibniz-Zentrum fuer Informatik},
  address =	{Dagstuhl, Germany},
  URL =		{http://drops.dagstuhl.de/opus/volltexte/2012/3774},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-37748},
  doi =		{10.4230/OASIcs.ICCSW.2012.116},
  annote =	{Keywords: open source software, mining software repositories, social networks}
}

Keywords: open source software, mining software repositories, social networks
Collection: 2012 Imperial College Computing Student Workshop
Issue Date: 2012
Date of publication: 09.11.2012

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