Comments on: Network Analysis of Open Source Communities http://nsdl.library.cornell.edu/websites/expertvoices/info2040/archives/2093 This is a supplemental blog for a course which will cover how the social, technological, and natural worlds are connected, and how the study of networks sheds light on these connections. Fri, 08 Mar 2013 14:27:29 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.3.3 By: jameshowison http://nsdl.library.cornell.edu/websites/expertvoices/info2040/archives/2093#comment-1347 jameshowison Fri, 13 Apr 2007 01:35:15 +0000 http://nsdl.library.cornell.edu/websites/expertvoices/info2040/archives/2093#comment-1347 Glad you enjoyed the article. I found this post via Technorati. I like your ideas for furthering the analysis, I've always though it would be better to have comparable studies of traditional, inside-company studies. Both the 80/20 contribution measures and the network measures. We followed this up with a study of hierarchy in the networks, and a study of the development of the networks over time (finding that changes in leadership might explain some of the decentralized findings, but that another important feature influencing the structure was inequality in tenure of the participants). You can find those papers at http://floss.syr.edu/publications/ One other thing we did was take network diagrams to open source conferences and see if people could identify people in central positions, and themselves. It was an informal study but they seemed pretty good at it (and it's a good way to demonstrate structural equivalence) :) Cheers, James Glad you enjoyed the article. I found this post via Technorati.

I like your ideas for furthering the analysis, I’ve always though it would be better to have comparable studies of traditional, inside-company studies. Both the 80/20 contribution measures and the network measures.

We followed this up with a study of hierarchy in the networks, and a study of the development of the networks over time (finding that changes in leadership might explain some of the decentralized findings, but that another important feature influencing the structure was inequality in tenure of the participants). You can find those papers at http://floss.syr.edu/publications/

One other thing we did was take network diagrams to open source conferences and see if people could identify people in central positions, and themselves. It was an informal study but they seemed pretty good at it (and it’s a good way to demonstrate structural equivalence) :)

Cheers,

James

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