Measuring coordination gaps of open source groups through social networks

Abstract

In this paper, we argue that coordination gaps, such as communication issues and task dependencies have significant impact on performance of work group. To address these issues, contemporary science suggests optimising links between social aspects of society and technical aspects of machines. A framework is proposed to describe social network structure and coordination performance variables with regards to distributed coordination during bug fixing in the Open Source domain. Based on the model and the literature reviewed, we propose two propositions-(i) level of interconnectedness has a negative relation with coordination performance; and, (ii) centrality social network measures have positive relation with coordination performance variables. We provide empirical analysis by using a large sample of 415 open source projects hosted on SourceForge.net. The results suggest that there is relationship between interconnectedness and coordination performance and centrality measures were found to have positive relationships with the performance variables of coordination measures.