RESILIENCE IN THE OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE COMMUNITY: HOW PANDEMIC AND UNEMPLOYMENT SHOCKS INFLUENCE CONTRIBUTIONS TO OTHERS' AND ONE'S OWN PROJECTS

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Malgonde, Onkar S.; Saldanha, Terence J. V.; Mithas, Sunil
• 署名单位: University of North Texas System; University of North Texas Denton; University System of Georgia; University of Georgia; State University System of Florida; University of South Florida
• 刊物名称: MIS QUARTERLY
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0276-7783
• DOI: 10.25300/MISQ/2022/17256
• 发表日期: 2023
• 页码: 361-390
• 关键词: Prosocial behavior; knowledge communities; INNOVATION EVIDENCE; PARTICIPATION; CONSERVATION; developers; RESOURCES; network; motivation; inclusion

摘要

Contributions by individual open source software (OSS) community members are the lifeblood of the OSS projects that power today's digital economy and are important for the very survival of such communities. Individual contributions by OSS community members to others' projects and their own determine whether OSS communities are resilient in the face of major shocks. Arguably, if crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic prompt users to reduce their contributions to others' projects relative to the contributions to their own projects, such behavior can have implications for the overall resilience of the OSS community. Therefore, whether and how individuals change their contributions in the face of a crisis is an important question. We examine whether members in an OSS community increased or decreased their contributions to others' projects relative to their own in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, a sudden and unexpected global health-related shock that has affected almost everyone. We also compare and contrast this behavior when the OSS community faced increasing unemployment, an economic cyclic shock that is arguably and relatively more personal. Drawing on the concept of prosocial behavior and conservation of resources (COR) theory, we hypothesize that the pandemic increased OSS community members' contributions to others' projects relative to their own; on the other hand, the threat of rising unemployment decreased OSS community members' contributions to others' projects relative to their own. Our empirical analyses of a longitudinal dataset of over 18,000 OSS community members on GitHub, with more than 1.4 million member-day observations, support our hypotheses. This study contributes by uncovering the differential effects of exogenous health-related and economic shocks on the resilience of the OSS community. We conclude with a discussion of our findings' implications for OSS community resilience.