Emergence of New Project Teams from Open Source Software Developer Networks: Impact of Prior Collaboration Ties.

Author List: Hahn, Jungpil; Moon, Jae Yun; Zhang, Chen;
Information Systems Research, 2008, Volume 19, Issue 3, Page 369-391.
Recent years have witnessed a surge in self-organizing voluntary teams collaborating online to produce goods and services. Motivated by this phenomenon, this research investigates how these teams are formed and how individuals make decisions about which teams to join in the context of open source software development (OSSD). The focus of this paper is to explore how the collaborative network affects developers' choice of newly initiated OSS projects to participate in. More specifically, by analyzing software project data from real-world OSSD projects, we empirically test the impact of past collaborative ties with and perceived status of project members in the network on the self-assembly of OSSD teams. Overall, we find that a developer is more likely to join a project when he has strong collaborative ties with its initiator. We also find that perceived status of the noninitiator members of a project influences its probability of attracting developers. We discuss the implications of our results with respect to self-organizing teams and OSSD.
Keywords: collaborative ties; developer social networks; open source software development (OSSD); team formation
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#273 0.347 source open software oss development developers projects developer proprietary community success openness impact paper project associated activity phenomenon peripheral variety
#249 0.135 network networks social analysis ties structure p2p exchange externalities individual impact peer-to-peer structural growth centrality participants sharing economic ownership embeddedness
#87 0.122 team teams virtual members communication distributed performance global role task cognition develop technology involved time individual's affects project geographically individuals
#265 0.105 collaborative groups feedback group work collective individuals higher effects efficacy perceived tasks members environment writing experiment did task intelligence compared
#279 0.056 field work changes new years time change major period year end use past early century half traditional areas established strong
#135 0.053 project projects development management isd results process team developed managers teams software stakeholders successful complex develop contingencies problems greater planning