The Secret of Open-Source Project Success

The researchers studied 2378 projects hosted at Sourceforge.net--a site where, according to the study's authors, 90 percent of all open-source projects are hosted--and found:

(1) "Teams with greater internal cohesion are more successful." Open-source projects are more successful when members trust one another, communication is strong, and there's a strong spirit of cooperation and belonging to a team.

(2) "External cohesion (cohesion among the external contacts of a team) has an inverse U-shaped relationship with the project's success; moderate levels of external cohesion are the best for a project's success, rather than very low or very high levels of this variable." Open-source projects benefit when team members can draw upon people they know outside the team for advice, information and expertise. Too much "cohesion" and everyone draws upon the same outsiders; too little and there's not enough trust in the advice coming from the outsiders. A moderate amount is just right.

(3) "The technological diversity of a contact also has the greatest benefit when it is neither too low nor too high." This is the same dynamic as the second finding: It helps to draw upon a wide range of technical knowledge and backgrounds.

(4) "The number of direct and indirect external contacts are positively correlated with a project's success."

What does this mean to managers and hosting sites? Here's what the authors of the study--Param Vir Singh and Yong Tan of the University of Washington, and Vijay Mookerjee of the University of Texas at Dallas--suggest:

"Open source hosting sites should try to develop a recommendation system to provide an appropriate pool of developers that a manager of a new project can target.

[Team] Managers should try to recruit developers who have either successfully worked together in past or worked separately with a common third party. Further, such developers should be put together in the team who tap into moderately cohesive external groups. The managerial focus in open source should be at identifying, recruiting and retaining such developers.

Open source developers, who do multitasking, work on multiple projects at a given time, should
choose to work on projects that are moderately technologically diverse from each other.

In established firms that promote their employees to work on open source projects, the managers should encourage them to work on such projects which are moderately technologically diverse or help the developer tap into distinct bodies of knowledge."

Singh, Param Vir; Tan, Yong and Mookerjee, Vijay, "Network Effects: The Influence of Structural Social Capital on Open Source Project Success" (April 2008). Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1111868

Posted by Allan Alter on April 9, 2008 4:28 PM