Application of Social Network Analysis to the Study of Open Source Software

Social network analysis has been used in many research areas to discover the intrinsic mechanisms of social communities by examining the topological properties of the social network formed by relationships between the actors and the groups in those communities. In this chapter, we construct four social networks for the Open Source Software (OSS) development community at SourceForge (Sourceforge 1999). For each social network, we expand the number of people in the network by including the next set of peripheral users as defined by their role in the community, moving from the core project leaders, to the core developers, to the co-developers, and finally out to active users. Social network properties such as degree distribution, diameter, cluster size, and clustering coefficient are calculated and compared for each of the expanding social networks, and we elaborate on how the changing topological characteristics of the social networks may signify important capabilities for the diffusion of information, the ability to find collaborations, and the overall robustness of the OSS development community. We further find that all the social networks have scale-free properties, and the inclusion of the co-developers and active users triggers the emergence of the small world phenomenon for the social network. We examine how these topological network properties may potentially explain the success and effciency of OSS development practices.