Social Capital, Structural Holes and Team Composition: Collaborative Networks of the Open Source Software Community

OSS developers bring to a project more than the skills and knowledge acquired through years of experience. They bring with them the ability to acquire resources from their social networks. The skills and capabilities of the developers referred to as ‘human capital’ by economists are supplemented by the capabilities to access resources from the network referred to as ‘social capital’ by sociologists. Since, OSS is developed in an open and social environment, social capital drawn from the collaboration network of developers would play an important role in developer productivity. In this study, we investigate the influence of social capital of team members on the productivity of the OSS development team. Specifically, we investigate whether teams composed of developers who form cohesive ties in their social space or teams composed of developers who tap into different knowledge pools are more productive in terms of technical development and commercial success of the software they produce. To examine this issue we focus on three key elements of the team members’ social network: direct ties, indirect ties and structural holes. Results from empirical analysis of OSS projects hosted at Sourceforge, suggest that both direct and indirect ties positively influence the productivity of teams. We further found that the greater the cohesive ties that the team members form in their social network the more productive they are.