Peer impressions in open source organizations: A survey

In virtual organizations, such as Open Source Software (OSS) communities, we expect that the impressions members have about each other play an important role in fostering effective collaboration. However, there is little empirical evidence about how peer impressions form and change in virtual organizations. This paper reports the results from a survey designed to understand the peer impression formation process among OSS participants in terms of perceived expertise, trustworthiness, productivity, experiences collaborating, and other factors that make collaboration easy or difficult. While the majority of survey respondents reported positive experiences, a non-trivial fraction had negative experiences. In particular, volunteer participants were more likely to report negative experiences than participants who were paid. The results showed that factors related to a person’s project contribution (e.g., quality and understandability of committed codes, important design related decisions, and critical fixes made) were more important than factors related to work style or personal traits. Although OSS participants are very task focused, the respondents believed that meeting their peers in person is beneficial for forming peer impressions. Having an appropriate impression of one’s OSS peers is crucial, but the impression formation process is complicated and different from the process in traditional organizations.