개방형협업 참여자의 지식창출•지식공유 구조와 혁신 성과: 오픈소스 소프트웨어 개발 커뮤니티를 중심으로

Abstract

This research focus on the effect of developers’ participation structure in knowledge creation and knowledge sharing activities in open source software development projects. Based on preferential selection theory, hypotheses of relationship between a developers’ concentration of knowledge creation/ sharing activities and collaboration performance was derived. To verify the hypotheses, we use the Gini coefficient in the commit contribution of the developers (knowledge creation) and the centralization index in the repository issue network (knowledge sharing network). Using social network analysis, this paper calculates centralization index from developers in the issue boards in each repository based on data from 837 repositories in GitHub, a leading open source software development platform. As a result, instead of all developers creating and sharing knowledge equally, only a few of developers creating and sharing knowledge intensively further improve the performance of the open collaboration. In other words, a few developers predominantly providing commit and actively responding to issues raised from other developers enhance the project performance. The results of this study are expected to be used by developers who manage open source software project as a governance strategy, which could improve the performance of open collaboration.