Resilience in the Open Source Software Community: How Pandemic and Unemployment Shocks Influence Contributions to Others’ and One’s Own Projects

IF 7 2区管理学 Q1 COMPUTER SCIENCE, INFORMATION SYSTEMS

Mis Quarterly Pub Date : 2023-03-01 DOI:10.25300/misq/2022/17256

Onkar S. Malgonde, Terence J.V. Saldanha, Sunil Mithas

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引用次数: 2

Abstract

Contributions by individual open source software (OSS) community members are the lifeblood of the OSS projects that power today’s digital economy and are important for the very survival of such communities. Individual contributions by OSS community members to others’ projects and their own determine whether OSS communities are resilient in the face of major shocks. Arguably, if crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic prompt users to reduce their contributions to others’ projects relative to the contributions to their own projects, such behavior can have implications for the overall resilience of the OSS community. Therefore, whether and how individuals change their contributions in the face of a crisis is an important question. We examine whether members in an OSS community increased or decreased their contributions to others’ projects relative to their own in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, a sudden and unexpected global health-related shock that has affected almost everyone. We also compare and contrast this behavior when the OSS community faced increasing unemployment, an economic cyclic shock that is arguably and relatively more personal. Drawing on the concept of prosocial behavior and conservation of resources (COR) theory, we hypothesize that the pandemic increased OSS community members’ contributions to others’ projects relative to their own; on the other hand, the threat of rising unemployment decreased OSS community members’ contributions to others’ projects relative to their own. Our empirical analyses of a longitudinal dataset of over 18,000 OSS community members on GitHub, with more than 1.4 million member-day observations, support our hypotheses. This study contributes by uncovering the differential effects of exogenous health-related and economic shocks on the resilience of the OSS community. We conclude with a discussion of our findings’ implications for OSS community resilience.

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开源软件社区的弹性:流行病和失业冲击如何影响对他人和自己项目的贡献

开源软件(OSS)社区成员个人的贡献是驱动当今数字经济的OSS项目的命脉，对这些社区的生存非常重要。OSS社区成员对他人项目和自己项目的个人贡献决定了OSS社区在面对重大冲击时是否具有弹性。可以说，如果像COVID-19大流行这样的危机促使用户减少对他人项目的贡献，而不是对自己项目的贡献，那么这种行为可能会对OSS社区的整体弹性产生影响。因此，面对危机，个人是否以及如何改变他们的贡献是一个重要的问题。我们研究了开源软件社区的成员在面对COVID-19大流行时，是增加还是减少了对他人项目的贡献，这是一场突如其来的全球健康冲击，几乎影响了每个人。当OSS社区面临日益增长的失业率时，我们还比较和对比了这种行为，这是一种有争议的、相对来说更个人化的经济循环冲击。根据亲社会行为和资源保护(COR)理论的概念，我们假设疫情增加了开源软件社区成员对他人项目的贡献，而不是他们自己的项目;另一方面，失业率上升的威胁减少了OSS社区成员对他人项目的贡献，而不是他们自己的项目。我们对GitHub上超过18,000名OSS社区成员的纵向数据集进行了实证分析，其中有超过140万成员日的观察结果，支持了我们的假设。这项研究的贡献在于揭示了与健康相关的外源性冲击和经济冲击对开源软件社区复原力的不同影响。最后，我们讨论了我们的发现对OSS社区弹性的影响。

本文章由计算机程序翻译，如有差异，请以英文原文为准。

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来源期刊

Mis Quarterly 工程技术-计算机：信息系统

CiteScore

13.30

自引率

4.10%

发文量

审稿时长

6-12 weeks

期刊介绍： Journal Name: MIS Quarterly Editorial Objective: The editorial objective of MIS Quarterly is focused on: Enhancing and communicating knowledge related to: Development of IT-based services Management of IT resources Use, impact, and economics of IT with managerial, organizational, and societal implications Addressing professional issues affecting the Information Systems (IS) field as a whole Key Focus Areas: Development of IT-based services Management of IT resources Use, impact, and economics of IT with managerial, organizational, and societal implications Professional issues affecting the IS field as a whole