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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