jhowison's blog

Just sent off the camera ready version of a paper built using data available in the tracker tables of the FLOSSmole database.

Howison, J., Inoue, K., and Crowston, K. (2006). Social dynamics of free and open source team communications. In Proceedings of the IFIP 2nd International Conference on Open Source Software, Lake Como, Italy. Available from: http://floss.syr.edu/publications/howison_dynamic_sna_intoss_ifip_short.pdf

This paper furthers inquiry into the social structure of free and open source software (FLOSS) teams by undertaking social network analysis across time. Contrary to expectations, we confirmed earlier findings of a wide distribution of centralizations even when examining the networks over time. The paper also provides empirical evidence that while change at the center of FLOSS projects is relatively uncommon, participation across the project communities is highly skewed, with many participants appearing for only one period. Surprisingly, large project teams are not more likely to undergo change at their centers.

As an example of the data and analysis in the system here is a graphic of developer counts over time, taken from the Project Summaries pages, developed by James Howison and Kevin Crowston using the OSSmole data. The time series are sorted, programatically, into 6 categories, from constantly rising, mostly rising, not trending, mostly falling, consistently falling and dead projects.