Online division of labour: emergent structures in Open Source Software
| Autor: | Javier Luis Cánovas Izquierdo, Jordi Cabot, María J. Palazzi, Albert Solé-Ribalta, Javier Borge-Holthoefer |
|---|---|
| Přispěvatelé: | Universitat Oberta de Catalunya. Internet Interdisciplinary Institute (IN3) |
| Jazyk: | angličtina |
| Rok vydání: | 2019 |
| Předmět: |
0301 basic medicine
FOS: Computer and information sciences Physics - Physics and Society Computer science Complex networks FOS: Physical sciences lcsh:Medicine 02 engineering and technology Physics and Society (physics.soc-ph) Article Task (project management) programari de codi obert Computer Science - Computers and Society Computer Science - Software Engineering 03 medical and health sciences open source software open source software de código abierto Computers and Society (cs.CY) 0202 electrical engineering electronic engineering information engineering codi obert Set (psychology) lcsh:Science Hierarchy Multidisciplinary Programari lliure código abierto lcsh:R 020207 software engineering Complex network Data science Software Engineering (cs.SE) 030104 developmental biology Asynchronous communication Software libre lcsh:Q Statistical physics Division of labour |
| Zdroj: | Scientific Reports, Vol 9, Iss 1, Pp 1-11 (2019) Scientific Reports O2, repositorio institucional de la UOC Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC) |
| Popis: | The development Open Source Software fundamentally depends on the participation and commitment of volunteer developers to progress. Several works have presented strategies to increase the on-boarding and engagement of new contributors, but little is known on how these diverse groups of developers self-organise to work together. To understand this, one must consider that, on one hand, platforms like GitHub provide a virtually unlimited development framework: any number of actors can potentially join to contribute in a decentralised, distributed, remote, and asynchronous manner. On the other, however, it seems reasonable that some sort of hierarchy and division of labour must be in place to meet human biological and cognitive limits, and also to achieve some level of efficiency. These latter features (hierarchy and division of labour) should translate into recognisable structural arrangements when projects are represented as developer-file bipartite networks. In this paper we analyse a set of popular open source projects from GitHub, placing the accent on three key properties: nestedness, modularity and in-block nestedness -which typify the emergence of heterogeneities among contributors, the emergence of subgroups of developers working on specific subgroups of files, and a mixture of the two previous, respectively. These analyses show that indeed projects evolve into internally organised blocks. Furthermore, the distribution of sizes of such blocks is bounded, connecting our results to the celebrated Dunbar number both in off- and on-line environments. Our analyses create a link between bio-cognitive constraints, group formation and online working environments, opening up a rich scenario for future research on (online) work team assembly. Comment: 11 pages, 6 figures, 1 table |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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