A Measurement of Social Capital in an Open Source Software Project

TL;DR

This paper models open source projects as organizational networks to measure social capital and investigates its impact on productivity through a case study of Apache Hadoop.

Contribution

It introduces a formal definition of social capital in open source organizational networks and proposes a mechanism to optimize it for better productivity.

Findings

Social capital can be created and measured within open source organizations.

There is a proportional relationship between social capital and organizational productivity.

Empirical evaluation confirms the relevance of social capital to project success.

Abstract

The paper provides an understanding of social capital in organizations that are open membership multi-agent systems with an emphasis in our formulation on the dynamic network of social interaction that, in part, elucidate evolving structures and impromptu topologies of networks. This paper, therefore, models an open source project as an organizational network. It provides definitions of social capital for this organizational network and formulation of the mechanism to optimize the social capital for achieving its goal that is optimized productivity. A case study of an open source Apache-Hadoop project is considered and empirically evaluated. An analysis of how social capital can be created within this type of organizations and driven to a measurement for its value is provided. Finally, a verification on whether the social capital of the organizational network is proportional towards optimizing their productivity is considered.