Start Date
10-12-2017 12:00 AM
Description
Nowadays open source software (OSS) development platform are increasingly using social networking -like functions like microblogging, aiming to use developers’ social influence to attract more high quality project participation. However, social influence is largely overlooked in OSS participation research and has often been studied from an economic utility framework in existing literature. Such a framework may be not suitable for analyzing the often non-monetary motivations behind OSS developer participations. We plan to empirically investigate the impacts of word of mouth (WOM) and observational learning (OL) on OSS developers’ initial and sustained participation behaviors, using data from a large OSS platform with more than 669,000 projects. Our preliminary results show that social influence has significant but rather different impacts on initial and sustained OSS participation. Specifically, the impacts of WOM on developers’ sustained participation faded away after initial participation as they can better evaluate the underlying project and its members’ opinion
Recommended Citation
Li, Xiao; Yang, Xuan; Hu, Daning; Wu, Ji; and Wang, Harry Jiannan, "Understanding the Impacts of Social Influence on Initial and Sustained Participation in Open Source Software Projects" (2017). ICIS 2017 Proceedings. 15.
https://aisel.aisnet.org/icis2017/IS-Development/Presentations/15
Understanding the Impacts of Social Influence on Initial and Sustained Participation in Open Source Software Projects
Nowadays open source software (OSS) development platform are increasingly using social networking -like functions like microblogging, aiming to use developers’ social influence to attract more high quality project participation. However, social influence is largely overlooked in OSS participation research and has often been studied from an economic utility framework in existing literature. Such a framework may be not suitable for analyzing the often non-monetary motivations behind OSS developer participations. We plan to empirically investigate the impacts of word of mouth (WOM) and observational learning (OL) on OSS developers’ initial and sustained participation behaviors, using data from a large OSS platform with more than 669,000 projects. Our preliminary results show that social influence has significant but rather different impacts on initial and sustained OSS participation. Specifically, the impacts of WOM on developers’ sustained participation faded away after initial participation as they can better evaluate the underlying project and its members’ opinion