Links to the source - a multidimensional view of social ties for the retention of FLOSS developers

Abstract

Free Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) is of vital importance for the daily life of many private and corporate users. However, the majority of all FLOSS initiatives fail, most commonly due to a lack of sustained developers. In contrast to previous research which used an individual centric or a structural perspective, this dissertation combines motivational and relational aspects to build a comprehensive understanding for FLOSS developers' ongoing project commitment. A unified research model is developed by drawing on established theories from organizational and sociological literature, in particular by combining SelfDetermination-Theory (SDT) and Social-Identity-Theory (SIT). Both SDT and SIT have been found valuable concepts for staffing decisions in organizations. In addition to the development and evaluation of the research model, this dissertation derives operational strategies for project managers of FLOSS initiatives on how to enhance the retention behavior of their contributor base.

Recommending Open Source Software Projects to Developers

“…Overall, we observe that on one side, the literature has shown the effect of project attributes on turnover (Chengalur-Smith et al 2010;Oh et al 2016;Schilling et al 2012a;Shah 2006;Yamashita et al 2016), but on the other side, another stream of literature shows the effect of developers' skills/preferences on turnover (Sharma et al 2012;Steinmacher et al 2015;Yu et al 2012). Drawing from these two streams, we argue that lower turnover in OSS may depend on adequately matching socio-technical attributes of both developer and projects.…”

“…Overall, these filtering mechanism aren't effective in OSS ecosystem due to its size and dynamic nature, resulting into low retention rates of developers (Schilling et al 2012b). Recent studies confirm that a large number of developers leave OSS projects due to inappropriate project selection (Steinmacher et al 2015) leading to project failure (Schilling 2012).…”

“…Developers' social commitments (Schilling et al 2013), social ties (Schilling 2012) and social identity with OSS community drives their sustained participation in OSS projects (Chou and He 2011;Fang and Neufeld 2009). Therefore developers' social and technical skills should be aligned with that of project members and project goals (Schilling et al 2012b), which is often not the case and lacks in developers' project selection process leading to higher attrition rates.…”

Open Science and Open Innovation in a socio‐political context: knowledge production for societal impact in an age of post‐truth populism

“…Early contributors noted that individuals were motivated to participate in open source projects for both intrinsic reasons such as the sense of enjoyment it produced and the sense of altruism generated (von Krogh and von Hippel, ; Roberts et al, ; Schilling, ) and extrinsic reasons, such as the reputation enhancement of being involved and the private use of the software developed (Hars and Ou, ; Hertel et al, ; Azmi and Alavi, ). Weber () included reputation and ego‐building and a sense of community and identity, which resonated closely with Levy's () research with MIT programmers in the 1960s.…”

Improve Your Social Network and Have the Advantage in the Employment Seeking Process

“…The strength of the tie depends on the closeness of the two participants e.g. experience with each other, time to know each other and how the two individuals are embedded in the network (Granovetter, 1973;Schilling, 2012). The theory expects that individuals use the networks to have an advantage and they can use their networks to reach an objective.…”