Abstract
Open collaboration communities (OCCs) allow diverse contributors to participate in creation, management, and use of content that is freely accessible. While OCCs have been critical to enterprise and consumer software, recent advancements in large language models that are supported by data from OCCs further highlight their importance. Research on OCCs have considered the influence of multiple factors (such as individual motivations and external factors) on number of contributors to OCC. However, the influence of OCC contents’ quality signals on contributors is unknown. This research considers three related but distinct questions: (a) how does improvement signals influence the number of contributors to OCCs? (b) how does deficiency signals influence the number of contributors to OCCs? (c) how does quality signals of improvements and deficiencies influence the number of contributors to OCCs? We use data from GitHub to create a yearly panel with more than 1 million year-project observations. We find that (a) improvement signals are positively related to the number of contributors, (b) deficiency signals are positively related to the number of contributors, and (c) improvement and deficiency signals interact to negatively influence the number of contributors. This study contributes by considering the effect of OCC contents’ signals on the number of contributors. We conclude with discussion of findings’ implications for practice and research in open collaboration communities.
Recommended Citation
Iyengar, Kishen and Malgonde, Onkar, "Contributors to Open Collaboration Communities: The Role of Content’s Quality Signals" (2023). Proceedings of the 2023 Pre-ICIS SIGDSA Symposium. 12.
https://aisel.aisnet.org/sigdsa2023/12