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Title: Matching Skills, Past Collaboration, and Limited Competition: Modeling When Open-Source Projects Attract Contributors
Attracting and retaining new developers is often at the heart of open-source project sustainability and success. Previous research found many intrinsic (or endogenous) project characteristics asso- ciated with the attractiveness of projects to new developers, but the impact of factors external to the project itself have largely been overlooked. In this work, we focus on one such external factor, a project’s labor pool, which is dened as the set of contributors active in the overall open-source ecosystem that the project could plausibly attempt to recruit from at a given time. How are the size and characteristics of the labor pool associated with a project’s attractiveness to new contributors? Through an empirical study of over 516,893 Python projects, we found that the size of the project’s labor pool, the technical skill match, and the social connection be- tween the project’s labor pool and members of the focal project all signicantly inuence the number of new developers that the focal project attracts, with the competition between projects with overlapping labor pools also playing a role. Overall, the labor pool factors add considerable explanatory power compared to models with only project-level characteristics.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
2120323 1901311
PAR ID:
10552550
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ;
Publisher / Repository:
ACM
Date Published:
ISBN:
9798400703270
Page Range / eLocation ID:
42 to 54
Format(s):
Medium: X
Location:
San Francisco CA USA
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
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