Together but apart: how spatial, temporal and cultural distances affect FLOSS developers' project retention

Companies rely more and more on virtual teams which consist of globally dispersed members. Unfortunately, members' separation can raise considerable interpersonal challenges. In order to prevent conflicts from deescalating and ensure effective teamwork, companies pay careful attention to the management of members' spatial, temporal and cultural distances. While initiatives developing Free Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) similarly combine a worldwide distributed workforce, relatively little is known about how members' separation affects their collaboration. However, without such an understanding no adequate advice can be derived for managers of FLOSS initiatives on how to foster members' collaboration and retention. Building on lessons learned from the organizational domain this research hypothesizes that spatial, temporal and cultural distances are key factors for FLOSS developers' team integration and project retention. To evaluate our research hypotheses, we study FLOSS developers' contribution and conversation behavior and extract objective figures on their spatial, temporal and cultural distances to each other.