The Meso-level structure of F/OSS collaboration network: local communities and their innovativeness

Conaldi, Guido and Rullani, Francesco (2010) The Meso-level structure of F/OSS collaboration network: local communities and their innovativeness. In: 6th International IFIP WG 2.13 Conference on Open Source Systems, OSS 2010. IFIP Advances in Information and Communication Technology (319). Springer, Boston, pp. 42-52. ISBN 978-3-642-13243-8

Abstract

Social networks in Free/Open Source Software (F/OSS) have been usually analyzed at the level of the single project, or at the level of a whole ecology of projects. In this paper, we also investigate the social network generated by developers who collaborate to one or multiple F/OSS projects, but we focus on the less-studied meso-level structure emerging when applying to this network a community-detection technique. The network of ‘communities’ emerging from this analysis links sub-groups of densely connected developers, sub-groups that are smaller than the components of the network but larger than the teams working on single projects. Our results reveal the complexity of this meso-level structure, where several dense sub-groups of developers are connected by sparse collaboration among different sub-groups. We discuss the theoretical implications of our findings with reference to the wider literature on collaboration networks and potential for innovation. We argue that the observed empirical meso-structure in F/OSS collaboration network resembles that associated to the highest levels of innovativeness.

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