The Strength of Weak Ties Between Open-Source Developers

TL;DR

This study investigates how weak social ties among open-source developers on GitHub influence their creativity, finding that diverse interactions, especially weak ones like starring projects, significantly boost project innovativeness.

Contribution

It demonstrates that weak ties, such as starring, are stronger predictors of developer creativity and project innovation than strong interactions like commits.

Findings

Topical diversity correlates with project innovativeness.

Weak interactions like starring predict future novelty more effectively.

Diverse engagement enhances software creativity.

Abstract

In a real-world social network, weak ties (reflecting low-intensity, infrequent interactions) act as bridges and connect people to different social circles, giving them access to diverse information and opportunities that are not available within one's immediate, close-knit vicinity. Weak ties can be crucial for creativity and innovation, as they introduce ideas and approaches that people can then combine in novel ways, leading to innovative solutions. Do weak ties facilitate creativity in software in similar ways? This paper suggests that the answer is "yes." Concretely, we study the correlation between developers' knowledge acquisition through three distinct interaction networks on GitHub and the innovativeness of the projects they develop, across over 37,000 Python projects hosted on GitHub. Our findings suggest that the topical diversity of projects in which developers engage, rather than the volume, correlates positively with the innovativeness of their future code. Notably, exposure through weak interactions (e.g., starring) emerges as a stronger predictor of future novelty than via strong ones (e.g., committing)