The small-world effect

Abstract

In this study we investigate the impact of community-level networks—relationships that exist among developers in an OSS community—on the productivity of member developers. Specifically, we argue that OSS community networks characterized by small-world properties would positively influence the productivity of the member developers by providing them with speedy and reliable access to more quantity and variety of information and knowledge resources. Specific hypotheses are developed and tested using longitudinal data on a large panel of 4,279 projects from 15 different OSS communities hosted at Sourceforge. Our results suggest that significant variation exists in small-world properties of OSS communities at Sourceforge. After accounting for project, foundry, and time-specific observed and unobserved effects, we found a statistically significant relationship between small-world properties of a community and the technical and commercial success of the software produced by its members. In contrast to the findings of prior research, we also found the lack of a significant relationship between closeness and betweenness centralities of the project teams and their success. These results were robust to a number of controls and model specifications.