Latent social structure in open source projects

TLDR

Commercial software projects are deliberately organized, whereas open‑source projects lack pre‑designed structures, leading to dynamic, self‑organizing latent subcommunities that emerge spontaneously in large, complex OSS projects. The study investigates whether these emergent subcommunities can illuminate how OSS projects self‑organize and offer insights for structuring commercial teams. By applying established community‑detection algorithms to the email networks of Apache HTTPD, Python, PostgreSQL, Perl, and Apache ANT, and validating the results against development activity logs, the authors identify latent subcommunities. The analysis confirms that subcommunities arise spontaneously, are most evident in technical discussions, and are strongly linked to collaborative behavior.

Abstract

Commercial software project managers design project organizational structure carefully, mindful of available skills, division of labour, geographical boundaries, etc. These organizational "cathedrals" are to be contrasted with the "bazaar-like" nature of Open Source Software (OSS) Projects, which have no pre-designed organizational structure. Any structure that exists is dynamic, self-organizing, latent, and usually not explicitly stated. Still, in large, complex, successful, OSS projects, we do expect that subcommunities will form spontaneously within the developer teams. Studying these subcommunities, and their behavior can shed light on how successful OSS projects self-organize. This phenomenon could well hold important lessons for how commercial software teams might be organized. Building on known well-established techniques for detecting community structure in complex networks, we extract and study latent subcommunities from the email social network of several projects: Apache HTTPD, Python, PostgresSQL, Perl, and Apache ANT. We then validate them with software development activity history. Our results show that subcommunities do indeed spontaneously arise within these projects as the projects evolve. These subcommunities manifest most strongly in technical discussions, and are significantly connected with collaboration behaviour.