Survival analysis in open development projects

Abstract

Open collaborative projects, like FLOSS development projects and open content creation projects (e.g. Wikipedia), heavily depend on contributions from their respective communities to improve. In this context, an important question for both researchers and practitioners is: what is the expected lifetime of contributors in a community? Answering this question, we will be able to characterize these communities as an appropriate model can show whether or not users maintain their interest to contribute, for how long we could expect them to collaborate and, as a result, improve the organization and management of the project. In this paper, we demonstrate that survival analysis, a wellknown statistical methodology in other research areas such as epidemiology, biology or demographic studies, is a useful methodology to undertake a quantitative comparison of the lifetime of contributors in open collaborative initiatives, like the development of FLOSS projects and the Wikipedia, providing insightful answers to this challenging question.