An Empirical Study of Speed and Communication in Globally Distributed Software Development
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
A life-cycle perspective on online community success
ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR)
Harnessing the wisdom of crowds in wikipedia: quality through coordination
Proceedings of the 2008 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work
Motivations for social networking at work
Proceedings of the 2008 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work
When social networks cross boundaries: a case study of workplace use of facebook and linkedin
Proceedings of the ACM 2009 international conference on Supporting group work
Using social media for work: Losing your time or improving your work?
Computers in Human Behavior
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Social media are being integrated into work environments. They have the potential to provide essential context and awareness, and increase work performance as a result. However, the specific effects of social media that impact productivity are not well understood. We perform a quantitative analysis of project success of over 5,000 open source software projects hosted on GitHub, a website that provides extensive social media functionality. Adapted from the open source literature, we develop two measures of project success, Developer Attention and Work Contribution. We find that projects with highly socially connected developers are not necessarily the most active or popular projects. Oddly, projects with a high level of developer multitasking, i.e., splitting effort equally across multiple projects, tend to receive less Developer Attention, but greater Work Contribution. Success on both measures is strongly positively associated with greater concentration of work among a small number of developers. We discuss the implications of the findings for social media in online production.