Social Capital Characteristics of Open Source Software Opinion Leaders

Abstract

Open Source Software (OSS) has been proved to benefit organizations in many aspects. Given the importance of OSS opinion leaders in influencing organizational adoption of OSS, I set out to identify the characteristics differentiating OSS opinion leaders and non OSS opinion leaders, so as to locate the OSS opinion leaders and better leverage their influences. Specifically, I posit that within an organization's IT department, OSS opinion leaders should have different social network profiles in terms of degree of centrality, betweenness, closeness and in-degree centrality from their peers who are not OSS opinion leaders. I also postulate that differences exist in the two groups' demographic characteristics such as age, educational level, tenure in organization, position in organization, and personality profiles such as openness and extraversion. A field survey using Social Network Analysis technique was carried out to test the hypotheses. Based on the findings, important theoretical and practical implications are identified.