Rockstar Effect in Distributed Project Management on GitHub Social Networks

The internet has become increasingly social, opening up new space for online collaboration and distributed project management. Decentralized management techniques such as open-source software, distributed development, and software-as-a-service allow software developers to easily connect online and to solve complex problems collaboratively. Online rockstars, who are well-respected in a community and are followed by numerous other users, often influence the decisions of project managers and clients in software development. Understanding the effects of these rockstars can greatly facilitate technology development and adoption in distributed project management. This paper presents a study of the GitHub social network to understand rockstar effect in distributed project management. In GitHub, developers often collaborate in distributed teams and interact in their online social networks, which evolve with the popularity of software repositories and actions of rockstars. To understand how rockstars influence the popularity of software repositories, this research constructed temporal social networks from 2015 to 2017 between 13.5 million software repositories and 2.6 million GitHub users and examined the evolvement of the behavior of 245,501 rockstar followers. The results show that the more followers a rockstar has, the more triadic events there are in his/her participated repository. And the difference of a number of events between top rockstar and other rockstars is much higher in participative events than in contributive events, indicating higher triadic influence from top rockstar in those events for technology development in distributed project management

GitHub: Factors Influencing Project Activity Levels

Open source software projects typically extend the capabilities of their software by incorporating code contributions from a diverse cross-section of developers. This GitHub structural path modelling study captures the current top 100 JavaScript projects in operation for at least one year or more. It draws on three theories (information integration, planned behavior, and social translucence) to help frame its comparative path approach, and to show ways to speed the collaborative development of GitHub OSS projects. It shows a project’s activity level increases with: (1) greater responder-group collaborative efforts, (2) increased numbers of major critical project version releases, and (3) the generation of further commits. However, the generation of additional forks negatively impacts overall project activity levels

Big data values deliverance: OSS model

Open source software (OSS) repositories, like GitHub, conjointly build numerous big data projects. GitHub developers and/or its responders extend/enhance a project’s software capabilities. Over time, GitHub’s repositories are mined for new knowledge and capabilities. This study’s values-deliverance staging system data mines, isolates, collates and incorporates relevant GitHub text into values deliverance model constructs. This suggests differential construct effects influence a project’s activities levels. The study suggests OSS big data platforms can be software data mined to isolate and assess the values embedded. This also elucidates pathways where behavioral values deliverance improvements to GitHub can likely be most beneficial

Open source software GitHub ecosystem: a SEM approach

Open source software (OSS) is a collaborative effort. Getting affordable high-quality software with less probability of errors or fails is not far away. Thousands of open-source projects (termed repos) are alternatives to proprietary software development. More than two-thirds of companies are contributing to open source. Open source technologies like OpenStack, Docker and KVM are being used to build the next generation of digital infrastructure. An iconic example of OSS is 'GitHub' - a successful social site. GitHub is a hosting platform that host repositories (repos) based on the Git version control system. GitHub is a knowledge-based workspace. It has several features that facilitate user communication and work integration. Through this thesis I employ data extracted from GitHub, and seek to better understand the OSS ecosystem, and to what extent each of its deployed elements affects the successful development of the OSS ecosystem. In addition, I investigate a repo's growth over different time periods to test the changing behavior of the repo. From our observations developers do not follow one development methodology when developing, and growing their project, and such developers tend to cherry-pick from differing available software methodologies. GitHub API remains the main OSS location engaged to extract the metadata for this thesis's research. This extraction process is time-consuming - due to restrictive access limitations (even with authentication). I apply Structure Equation Modelling (termed SEM) to investigate the relative path relationships between the GitHub- deployed OSS elements, and I determine the path strength contributions of each element to determine the OSS repo's activity level. SEM is a multivariate statistical analysis technique used to analyze structural relationships. This technique is the combination of factor analysis and multiple regression analysis. It is used to analyze the structural relationship between measured variables and/or latent constructs. This thesis bridges the research gap around longitude OSS studies. It engages large sample-size OSS repo metadata sets, data-quality control, and multiple programming language comparisons. Querying GitHub is not direct (nor simple) yet querying for all valid repos remains important - as sometimes illegal, or unrepresentative outlier repos (which may even be quite popular) do arise, and these then need to be removed from each initial OSS's language-specific metadata set. Eight top GitHub programming languages, (selected as the most forked repos) are separately engaged in this thesis's research. This thesis observes these eight metadata sets of GitHub repos. Over time, it measures the different repo contributions of the deployed elements of each metadata set. The number of stars-provided to the repo delivers a weaker contribution to its software development processes. Sometimes forks work against the repo's progress by generating very minor negative total effects into its commit (activity) level, and by sometimes diluting the focus of the repo's software development strategies. Here, a fork may generate new ideas, create a new repo, and then draw some original repo developers off into this new software development direction, thus retarding the original repo's commit (activity) level progression. Multiple intermittent and minor version releases exert lesser GitHub JavaScript repo commit (or activity) changes because they often involve only slight OSS improvements, and because they only require minimal commit/commits contributions. More commit(s) also bring more changes to documentation, and again the GitHub OSS repo's commit (activity) level rises. There are both direct and indirect drivers of the repo's OSS activity. Pulls and commits are the strongest drivers. This suggests creating higher levels of pull requests is likely a preferred prime target consideration for the repo creator's core team of developers. This study offers a big data direction for future work. It allows for the deployment of more sophisticated statistical comparison techniques. It offers further indications around the internal and broad relationships that likely exist between GitHub's OSS big data. Its data extraction ideas suggest a link through to business/consumer consumption, and possibly how these may be connected using improved repo search algorithms that release individual business value components

An Ethnographic Study of Motivations to Participate in, and Contribute Knowledge to, a Hybrid-Economic Professional I.T. Community

This dissertation explores motivations for knowledge sharing in the professional community oriented around the use, design, and engineering of Microsoft SharePoint. An original, mixed-methods ethnographic study identifies motivations to participate and contribute knowledge, and examines the sociotechnical structures that are both the product of diversely-motivated social action and the context in which participation and knowledge sharing is performed. A focus is placed on social information systems - information technologies designed and used to process information about the individual in order to mediate such social constructs as peer recognition and reputation - and the effect these systems have as rewards on problems of low levels and diverse types of participation. Results from a cultural consensus analysis survey finds that the opportunity to learn job-related skills, gain access to knowledgeable experts, and make and maintain social connections for personal and professional purposes were primary among motivations to participate. Additionally, data suggests a sub-culture may exist that runs contrary to the primary cultural beliefs in the community, believing instead that the pursuit of symbolic recognition and "fame" most-motivate participation. Socio-structural analysis identifies market- and commons-based structures in the SharePoint community, and finds that participation, its motivations, and the enacted structuration processes cannot be reduced to either market or commons structures. The SharePoint community is better understood as a hybrid-economic community that produces knowledge and knowledge-sharing contexts out of the complex relationship between market- and commons-based modalities. The study concludes with a critical analysis of the Microsoft MVP Award, a product of the hybrid-economic SharePoint community and a progenitor to social media-based social information systems for recognition, reputation, and reward. Findings raise specific issues for adopters of "Gamification" - a design paradigm in which game elements are introduced to non-game contexts - particularly concerning cases where social information systems are used as assessment methods or motivational devices. The study advances theory by introducing an alternative to the marketplace and the commons as social contexts for knowledge creation by explicating specific structuration processes underlying hybrid-economic knowledge sharing. Finally, the study contributes to the advancement of research methods by specifying a process for integrating qualitative and quantitative ethnographic data.Ph.D., Information Studies -- Drexel University, 201