Abstract
We examine the relationship between communications by core and peripheral members and Free/Libre Open Source Software project success. The study uses data from 74 projects in the Apache Software Foundation Incubator. We conceptualize project success in terms of success building a community, as assessed by graduation from the Incubator. We compare successful and unsuccessful projects on volume of communication and on use of inclusive pronouns as an indication of efforts to create intimacy among team members. An innovation of the paper is that use of inclusive pronouns is measured using natural language processing techniques. We also compare the volume and content of communication produced by core (committer) and peripheral members and by those peripheral members who are later elected to be core members. We find that volume of communication is related to project success but use of inclusive pronouns does not distinguish successful projects. Core members exhibit more contribution and use of inclusive pronouns than peripheral members.
Highlights
Community-based Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) projects are developed and maintained by teams of individuals collaborating in globally-distributed environments [1]
Only graduated projects had future core members who posted on the mailing list during incubation. (By future core members, we mean committers who were not in the list of committers at the start of the data collection but were elected later as documented in an announcement to the mailing list.) These results provide evidence for the validity of our choice of graduation as a measure of success in building a project community
Counter to our expectations, the use of inclusive pronouns did not distinguish successful and unsuccessful projects. This finding suggests that while it is true that the unsuccessful projects failed in growing their membership, there is no evidence that this failure was due to peripheral members of the group feeling less ownership of the project and so not moving in to the core
Summary
Community-based Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) projects are developed and maintained by teams of individuals collaborating in globally-distributed environments [1]. Members have different levels of participation in FLOSS development and so take on different project roles [7]. A widely-accepted model of roles in community-based FLOSS teams is the core-periphery structure [5, 8, 9]. Crowston and Howison [2] see community-based FLOSS teams as having an onion-like core-periphery structure, in which the core category includes core developers and the periphery includes co-developers and active users. Rullani and Haefliger [10] described periphery as a “cloud” of members that orbits around the core members of open source software development teams
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