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Online division of labour: emergent structures in Open Source Software.
María J Palazzi1, Jordi Cabot1,2, Javier Luis Cánovas Izquierdo1
1Internet Interdisciplinary Institute (IN3), Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain.
Scientific Reports
|September 27, 2019
Summary
Open source software development involves volunteer developers organizing into structured blocks, reflecting cognitive limits and leading to efficient teamwork. This research reveals how developer groups self-organize within projects.
Area of Science:
- Computer Science
- Sociology
- Network Science
Background:
- Open Source Software (OSS) development relies on volunteer participation.
- Existing research focuses on contributor onboarding and engagement, but less on self-organization dynamics.
- GitHub's decentralized platform contrasts with the need for hierarchy and division of labor due to human cognitive limits.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate how diverse developer groups self-organize in OSS projects.
- To analyze the structural arrangements in developer-file bipartite networks.
- To understand the emergence of hierarchy and division of labor in decentralized development.
Main Methods:
- Analysis of popular open source projects from GitHub.
- Representation of projects as developer-file bipartite networks.
- Examination of key network properties: nestedness, modularity, and in-block nestedness.
Main Results:
- OSS projects evolve into internally organized blocks, indicating emergent structure.
- The size distribution of these blocks is bounded, relating to Dunbar's number.
- Evidence of heterogeneity among contributors and subgroups of developers working on specific file groups.
Conclusions:
- Developer self-organization in OSS reflects bio-cognitive constraints, influencing group formation and efficiency.
- Findings link online work environments to established theories of group size and structure.
- Results provide a foundation for future research on online team assembly and modeling OSS project evolution.
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