Identifying the Network Characteristics of Contributors That Affect Performance in Open Collaboration : Focusing on the GitHub Open Source

Hyunmi Baek, Sehwan Oh

Abstract


Information and communications technology facilitates collaboration among individuals by functioning as an open platform for open collaboration projects. In this regard, this study aims to understand the network characteristics of participants who contribute greatly to open collaboration by investigating the mutual cooperation network in an open source project, which represents a form of open collaboration based on social network theory. To achieve this objective, this study analyzes the network centrality of developers with a high number of commits, particularly 8,101 developers in 782 repositories in GitHub, a representative open source platform. This study also determines how the relationship between network centrality and number of commits depends on the size of a repository network and the presence of a hub. Consequently, the number of commits by developers with high degree, betweenness, and closeness centrality is increasing. Among which, betweenness centrality has the highest explanatory power. Furthermore, when a hub is present and as network size increases, the relationship between the betweenness centrality of a developer and his/her number of commits continues to grow. This study is expected to provide suggestions for the successful performance of open collaboration projects in the future.


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