A4 Refereed article in a conference publication

Collaboration in the open-source arena: the webkit case




AuthorsJose Teixeira, Tingting Lin

Conference nameSIGMIS-CPR '14

Publication year2014

Book title Proceedings of the 52nd ACM conference on Computers and people research

Series titleProceedings of the 52nd ACM conference on Computers and people research

First page 121

Last page129

Number of pages9

ISBN978-1-4503-2625-4

DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1145/2599990.2600009(external)

Web address http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2600009(external)


Abstract

In an era of software crisis, the move of firms towards distributed software development teams is being challenged by emerging collaboration issues. On this matter, the open-source phenomenon may shed some light, as successful cases on distributed collaboration in the open-source community have been recurrently reported. In this paper, we explore the collaboration networks in the WebKit open-source project, by mining WebKit's source-code version-control-system data with Social Network Analysis (SNA). Our approach allows us to observe how key events in the mobile-device industry have affected the WebKit collaboration network over time. With our findings, we show the explanation power from network visualizations capturing the collaborative dynamics of a high-networked software project over time; and highlight the power of the open-source fork concept as a nexus enabling both features of competition and collaboration. We also reveal the WebKit project as a valuable research site manifesting the novel notion of open-coopetition, where rival firms collaborate with competitors in the open-source community.




Last updated on 2024-26-11 at 16:07