A Comparison of Evaluation Networks and Collaboration Networks in Open Source Software Communities

The open source software (OSS) development communities have experienced rapid growth in recent years. Previous social network studies on OSS communities focused on collaboration relationships. However, information about how OSS community members perceive each other is largely ignored. In this study, we report an empirical investigation of the evaluation network in an online OSS community which includes over 11,800 OSS projects and more than 94,330 developers. A collaboration network is modeled from this data set and analyzed for comparison purposes. We find the evaluation network is significantly different from collaboration network in average degree, average path length and fragmentation rate. Furthermore, we argue that the evaluation networks can be used to locate expertise - skillful developers in OSS communities and capture important social relationships among the developers missed in the collaboration network. These characteristics of the evaluation network may benefit the research of OSS development communities and expert recommendation systems

Exploring the Impact of Socio-Technical Core-Periphery Structures in Open Source Software Development

In this paper we apply the social network concept of core-periphery structure to the sociotechnical structure of a software development team. We propose a socio-technical pattern that can be used to locate emerging coordination problems in Open Source projects. With the help of our tool and method called TESNA, we demonstrate a method to monitor the socio-technical core-periphery movement in Open Source projects. We then study the impact of different core-periphery movements on Open Source projects. We conclude that a steady core-periphery shift towards the core is beneficial to the project, whereas shifts away from the core are clearly not good. Furthermore, oscillatory shifts towards and away from the core can be considered as an indication of the instability of the project. Such an analysis can provide developers with a good insight into the health of an Open Source project. Researchers can gain from the pattern theory, and from the method we use to study the core-periphery movements

Mining Communication Data in a Music Community: A Preliminary Analysis

Comments play an important role within online creative communities because they make it possible to foster the production and improvement of authors' artifacts. We investigate how comment-based communication help shape members' behavior within online creative communities. In this paper, we report the results of a preliminary study aimed at mining the communication network of a music community for collaborative songwriting, where users collaborate online by first uploading new songs and then by adding new tracks and providing feedback in forms of comments.Comment: In: Garrig\'os I., Wimmer M. (eds) Current Trends in Web Engineering. ICWE 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 10544. Springer, ISBN:978-3-319-74432-

Constructing Temporal Networks of OSS Programming Language Ecosystems

One of the primary factors that encourage developers to contribute to open source software (OSS) projects is the collaborative nature of OSS development. However, the collaborative structure of these communities largely remains unclear, partly due to the enormous scale of data to be gathered, processed, and analyzed. In this work, we utilize the World Of Code dataset, which contains commit activity data for millions of OSS projects, to build collaboration networks for ten popular programming language ecosystems, containing in total over 290M commits across over 18M projects. We build a collaboration graph representation for each language ecosystem, having authors and projects as nodes, which enables various forms of social network analysis on the scale of language ecosystems. Moreover, we capture the information on the ecosystems' evolution by slicing each network into 30 historical snapshots. Additionally, we calculate multiple collaboration metrics that characterize the ecosystems' states. We make the resulting dataset publicly available, including the constructed graphs and the pipeline enabling the analysis of more ecosystems.Comment: Accepted to SANER 202

Discovering Determinants of Project Participation in an Open Source Social Network

Successful open source software projects often require a steady supply of self motivated software developers. However, little work has been done from a relational/network perspective to study the factors that drive the developers to participate in OSS projects. In this paper, we investigate the participation dynamics in a social network, particularly in an online open source community called Ohloh. Through a REST-based API, we collected information about 11,530 open source software projects involving 94,330 developers. Using social network analysis and statistical analysis methods, we examine a set of social and technical factors in the Ohloh dataset, which we define as the determinants that significantly influence the developers’ participation choices. We found that the determinants include (1)homophily in programming language, (2)project mutual acquaintance, and (3)project age. In addition, our research findings provide the possibility of predicting developers’ participation choices based on the discovered determinants, and therefore can have important implications for OSS project management and in designing social network enabled recommendation systems

HOW MICROBLOG FOLLOWER NETWORKS AFFECT OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE PROJECT SUCCESS

Successful open source software (OSS) projects require efficient communication means and a steady supply of voluntary developers. Microblogging, as well as the follower network it generates, is becoming increasingly popular as an emerging Web 2.0 communication technology in many online OSS communities. However, little is known about how microblogging follower networks affect OSS project success. Based on theories drawn from the social network domain, OSS and virtual team research,we hypothesized two follower network mechanisms – preferential attachment and structural holes – which may significantly affect OSS project success, by improving knowledge sharing and attracting more skillful developers. We plan to empirically study a microblog follower network in a large online OSS community, aiming to examine the impacts of the two hypothesized follower network mechanisms on OSS project success. Our potential findings may provide insights for OSS project managers to better manage microblog communications and thereby achieve project success

A Social Network Perspective on the Success of Open Source Software: The Case of R Packages

In this paper, we seek to identify the factors that influence the impact of open source software (OSS) on users community through the analysis of the evolution of the OSS network. Based on longitudinal data collected from the comprehensive R archive network (CRAN), we empirically examine how the network of R packages evolves over time and exert its influence on the scientific community. We find that critical network features derived from CRAN, such as page-rank, closeness, and betweenness centralities, play a significant role in determining the impact of each package on the research and publication activities in the scientific community. Furthermore, the performance of R packages can be explained as a flow of information from the core to the periphery that exhibits strong spillover effects

Beyond Cryptocurrencies - A Taxonomy of Decentralized Consensus Systems

The advent of Bitcoin in 2009 has not only introduced Cryptocurrencies and lead to a new digitization movement in the financial, especially payments industry but also made way for a new breed of innova-tive technologies based on decentralized digital currencies. Generally, decentralized consensus sys-tems could change the very nature of how companies, organizations and individuals are built and in-teract with each other. Decentralized consensus systems, decentralized applications and smart con-tracts provide the conceptual framework as well as the technological basis to establish predefined, incorruptible protocols and contracts to organize human behavior and interconnectedness. However, the technical protocols and implementations are quite complex and practitioners as well as interdisci-plinary researchers not familiar with cryptography, network protocols or decentralized networks are struggling to find access to these concepts and grasp their potential. To fill this gap, we develop a comprehensive taxonomy of decentralized consensus systems in order to provide a tool for researchers and practitioners alike to facilitate classification and analysis of emerging technologies in the field of Crypto 2.0 , the next level of innovation beyond cryptocurrencies