Differential impacts of social influence on initial and sustained participation in open source software projects

Abstract

Social networking tools and visible information about developer activities on open source software (OSS) development platforms can leverage developers' social influence to attract more participation from their peers. However, the differential impacts of such social influence on developers' initial and sustained participation behaviors were largely overlooked in previous research. We empirically studied the impacts of two social influence mechanisms—word‐of‐mouth (WOM) and observational learning (OL)—on these two types of participation, using data collected from a large OSS development platform called Open Hub. We found that action (OL) speaks louder than words (WOM) with regard to sustained participation. Moreover, project age positively moderates the impacts of social influence on both types of participation. For projects with a higher average workload, the impacts of OL are reduced on initial participation but are increased on sustained participation. Our study provides a better understanding of how social influence affects OSS developers' participation behaviors. It also offers important practical implications for designing software development platforms that can leverage social influence to attract more initial and sustained participation.

Motivational Influences Affecting Middle-Aged and Elderly Users’ Participation Intention in Health-Related Social Media

“…We connect the two stages of motivation evolution through the connection between initial participation and intention to continue participation. Yang, Li, Hu, and Wang [ 59 ] studied open source software’s initial and continuous participation. The study took the two as dependent variables, to discuss the effect of word-of-mouth verse and observational learning.…”

“…With the continuous improvement of people’s standards of living, the concept of a healthy lifestyle has received widespread attention in societies. Most previous HRSM studies focused on participation behavior, and some studies explored initial participation and continuous participation [ 59 , 85 , 102 , 105 , 106 ]. However, users’ first use affects their subsequent behaviors to a large extent [ 107 ], so it is of critical importance to explore the influence of initial behavior on intention to continue using.…”

“…Initial participation refers to the very first time that an individual ever participates [ 59 ]. In this study, it refers to middle-aged and elderly people’s first-time use of HRSM functions, and their participation in activities such as browsing content and interacting.…”

“…Intention to continue to participate refers to the degree of willingness to continue using functions and participating in activities [ 59 ]. A strong intention by the middle-aged and elderly to continue participating in HRSM will indicate that they are willing to use HRSM and spend more time on HRSM.…”

Social-technical network effects in open source software communities: understanding the impacts of dependency networks on project success

“…Open source software (OSS) has attracted many developers from dispersed geographical locations. Online communities make the distributed collaboration for developing OSS possible (Yang et al. , 2021).…”