论文标题
开源软件可持续性:结合机构分析和社会技术网络
Open Source Software Sustainability: Combining Institutional Analysis and Socio-Technical Networks
论文作者
论文摘要
开源软件(OSS)构成了我们数字社会的大部分结构,尤其是成功和可持续的社会。但是,许多OSS项目并不可持续,从而遗弃了世界数字基础设施。先前的工作已经研究了这一原因主要是从两个截然不同的角度来看。在软件工程中,重点是从社会技术的角度理解成功和可持续性:OSS程序员的日常活动及其创造的工件。另一方面,在制度分析中,重点是结构治理的制度设计(例如政策,规则和规范)。即使每个方法都需要全面了解OSS项目,但几乎没有探索两种方法之间的连接和互动。 在本文中,我们通过将机构分析与社会技术系统分析相结合,首先使用双视图分析来理解OSS项目的可持续性。特别是,我们(i)使用语言方法来从OSS贡献者的沟通中提取机构规则和规范来代表其治理系统的演变,以及(ii)基于纵向协作记录来构建社会技术网络,以代表每个项目的组织结构。我们将这两种方法组合在一起,并将它们应用于Apache Software Foundation(ASF)孵化器中253个新生OSS项目的开发人员跟踪数据集。我们发现,社会技术和机构特征相互关联,并对ASF OSS项目的进步提供了互补的观点。完善这些组合分析可以帮助您更精确地了解制度治理和组织结构之间的同步。
Open Source Software (OSS) forms much of the fabric of our digital society, especially successful and sustainable ones. But many OSS projects do not become sustainable, resulting in abandonment and even risks for the world's digital infrastructure. Prior work has looked at the reasons for this mainly from two very different perspectives. In software engineering, the focus has been on understanding success and sustainability from the socio-technical perspective: the OSS programmers' day-to-day activities and the artifacts they create. In institutional analysis, on the other hand, emphasis has been on institutional designs (e.g., policies, rules, and norms) that structure governance. Even though each is necessary for a comprehensive understanding of OSS projects, the connection and interaction between the two approaches have been barely explored. In this paper, we make the first effort toward understanding OSS project sustainability using a dual-view analysis, by combining institutional analysis with socio-technical systems analysis. In particular, we (i) use linguistic approaches to extract institutional rules and norms from OSS contributors' communications to represent the evolution of their governance systems, and (ii) construct socio-technical networks based on longitudinal collaboration records to represent each project's organizational structure. We combined the two methods and applied them to a dataset of developer traces from 253 nascent OSS projects within the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) incubator. We find that the socio-technical and institutional features relate to each other, and provide complementary views into the progress of the ASF's OSS projects. Refining these combined analyses can help provide a more precise understanding of the synchronization between the evolution of institutional governance and organizational structure.