Workings of Collective Intelligence within Open Source Communities

Abstract

Open source communities have been of great interest for researchers recently, yet little can be agreed upon when it comes to developers motives. While it has been shown that participants are mostly driven to contribute based on work related needs, it has also been shown that they contribute to fulfill an ideological purpose. We believe that the majority of participants contribute to satisfy their own personal goals. We reveal how developers function as a collective intelligence by modeling the open source community as a disjoint group of contributors. We show that most developers contribute to only one project and only to a small portion of its source code. We demonstrated that useful functionality of most OSS software is an emergent phenomenon created by a collection of developers with different motivations and personal goals.