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Recent work on open source sustainability shows that successful trajectories of projects in the Apache Software Foundation Incubator (ASFI) can be predicted early on, using a set of socio-technical measures. Because OSS projects are socio-technical systems centered around code artifacts,we hypothesize that sustainable projects may exhibit different code and process patterns than unsustainable ones, and that those patterns can grow more apparent as projects evolve over time. Here we studied the code and coding processes of over 200 ASFI projects, and found that ASFI graduated projects have different patterns of code quality and complexity than retired ones. Likewise for the coding processes – e.g., feature commits or bug-fixing commits are correlated with project graduation success. We find that minor contributors and major contributors (who contribute <5%, respectively >=95% commits) associate with graduation outcomes, implying that having also developers who contribute fewer commits are important for a project’s success. This study provides evidence that OSS projects, especially nascent ones, can benefit from introspection and instrumentation using multidimensional modeling of the whole system, including code, processes, and code quality measures, and how they are interconnected over time.
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How Co-creation Processes Unfold and Predict Submission Quality in Crowd-based Open Innovation
Crowd-based open innovation communities have received increasing attention, based on the premise that leveraging the power and diversity of the crowd can lead to innovative outcomes. However, we still know little about how work is coordinated over time in this context, especially as the innovation process moves from idea generation to elaboration. Based on literature and theories of coordination and collaboration in traditional creative contexts and on emergent evidence from research on crowd work, we develop hypotheses about the unique interaction patterns that characterize co-creation and how these patterns impact, over time, submission quality. To test our hypotheses, we conducted a study of a crowd-based open innovation platform. We found that, in general, the diversity of contributors increased over time, but for high quality submissions, the number of contributors decreased and a small group of involved people became more dominant in providing feedback. Further, we observe that the creators of more successful submissions, while not dominating the discussion, were particularly engaged in the discussions in later stages. Our work contributes to understanding the temporal dynamics in open innovation communities by providing evidence that successful interaction patterns vary depending on the phase of the project.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1716992
- PAR ID:
- 10098975
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- International Conference on Information Systems
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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