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Developers of open-source software projects tend to collaborate in bursts of activity over a few days at a time, rather than at an even pace. A project might find its productivity suffering if bursts of activity occur when a key person with the right role or right expertise is not available to participate. Open-source projects could benefit from monitoring the way they orchestrate attention among key developers, finding ways to make themselves available to one another when needed. In commercial software development, Sociotechnical Congruence (STC) has been used as a measure to assess whether coordination among developers is sufficient for a given task. However, STC has not previously been successfully applied to open-source projects, in which some industrial assumptions do not apply: managementchosen targets, mandated steady work hours, and top-down task allocation of inputs and targets. In this work we propose an operationalization of STC for open-source software development. We use temporal bursts of activity as a unit of analysis more suited to the natural rhythms of open-source work, as well as open source analogues of other component measures needed for calculating STC. As an illustration, we demonstrate that opensource development on PyPI projects in GitHub is indeed bursty, that activities in the bursts have topical coherence, and we apply our operationalization of STC. We argue that a measure of socio-technical congruence adapted to open source could provide projects with a better way of tracking how effectively they are collaborating when they come together to collaborate. 

In this paper we describe a qualitative investigation of impression formation in an online distributed software development community with social media functionality. We find that users in this setting seek out additional information about each other to explore the project space, inform future interactions, and understand the potential future value of a new person. They form impressions around other users' expertise based on history of activity across projects, and successful collaborations with key high status projects in the community. These impressions influence their receptivity to strangers' work contributions.