Flat for the Few, Steep for the Many: Structural Cohesion and Rich-Club Effect as Measures of Hierarchy and Control in FLOSS Communities

  • Authors:

  • Guido Conaldi

  • Affiliations:

  • University of Lugano, Switzerland

  • Venue:
  • International Journal of Open Source Software and Processes
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

A discrepancy exists between the emphasis posed by practitioners on decentralized and non-hierarchical communication in Free Libre/Open Source Software FLOSS communities and empirical evidence of their hierarchical structure. To explain this paradox, it is hypothesized firstly that in FLOSS communities local sub-groups exist and are less hierarchical, more decentralized than the whole social network. Secondly, it is hypothesized that the bulk of communication exchanges taking place in the community happens inside local sub-groups formed by the most active community members. The recollection that practitioners have of FLOSS communities to which they participate would then be influenced by the position that they occupy inside those sub-groups. A measure of structural cohesion based on network node connectivity is proposed as an effective method to test whether FLOSS communication networks can be decomposed in nested hierarchies of progressively less centralized sub-groups. The recently introduced measure of weighted rich-club effect is adopted to test for the tendency of the most active community members to control communication by interacting more intensely with each other than with other members of the network. Results from a case study that are consistent with the hypotheses are presented and discussed.