Group Reputation in an Open Source Software Community: Antecedents and Outcomes

Abstract

Developer’s reputation in the OSS community is defined as the positive evaluations from his peers. While a large body of studies focuses on studying the importance of developers’ reputation in their participation motivations, there is still lack of understanding for two issues. First, which factors can lead to a high developer’s reputation? Second, how the reputation level in a project development group impact its project performance? In this study, we develop a theoretical model and conduct an empirical analysis in a large online open source community called as Ohloh. The results show that a developer’s reputation level is based on 1) his previous work quality, 2) his contribution percentage in previous projects, 3 )the time spent in previous projects, and 4) the number of previously participated projects. In addition, we find that the group with an overall higher level of reputation would achieve a better performance, while the individual reputation level deviation within the group would impair its performance. The implications of our findings and the future research direction are then discussed.