Jumping on the bandwagon? A longitudinal study on collaboration networks and decision to participate
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Tonellato, Marco and Conaldi, Guido 
ORCID: 0000-0003-3552-7307
(2010)
Jumping on the bandwagon? A longitudinal study on collaboration networks and decision to participate.
In: Proceedings of SunBelt XXX, 2010.
International Network for Social Network Analysis, p. 346.
Abstract
In the context of self-managing teams, whether a member decides to voluntarily take action in a required task may depend on how many fellow members have already done so. In this kind of binary decisions with externalities bandwagon or 'herding' effects play a crucial role in individual decisions to undertake a specific course of action. Such effects have been linked to a broad set of phenomena including diffusion of innovation, segregation, and success of fads. Building on these general results, in this paper we conjecture that individual decisions to take on a task (i.e., the matching between individuals and jobs) are influenced by network relations generated by collaboration among team members. In order to explore our conjecture we collected data on a Free/Open Source Software (F/OSS) project team consisting of 227 volunteer developers committed since 2002 to the development of a web browser. We reconstructed 2-mode co-collaboration networks (software developer by bug) in which a tie represents a voluntary action taken by a developer in order to solve a specific bug. Co-collaboration networks were collected for several six-month development cycles of the software. We report and discuss results of longitudinal actor-based modelling that we specify to test for the influence of local network structures on developer’s decision to take action on a specific bug. The study controls for bug-specific and developer-specific characteristics that may also affect developers’ decisions exogenously. We also control for priority and severity levels assigned by the team to bugs in an attempt to manage voluntary contribution.
| Item Type: | Conference Proceedings |
|---|---|
| Title of Proceedings: | Proceedings of SunBelt XXX, 2010 |
| Additional Information: | [1] Item presented as part of the 2-Mode Networks Section of the XXX Sunbelt Social Networks Conference held in Riva del Garda, Italy from 29 June to 4 July 2010 |
| Uncontrolled Keywords: | network dynamics, collaboration, open source floss software, affiliation networks, teams |
| Subjects: | H Social Sciences > HT Communities. Classes. Races Q Science > QA Mathematics > QA76 Computer software |
| Faculty / School / Research Centre / Research Group: | Faculty of Business > Networks and Urban Systems Centre (NUSC) > Centre for Business Network Analysis (CBNA) |
| Related URLs: | |
| Last Modified: | 04 Mar 2019 16:48 |
| URI: | http://gala.gre.ac.uk/id/eprint/7995 |
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