Ecology and Dynamics of Open Source Communities
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The goal of this chapter is to document the evolution of a portfolio of open source communities. These are communities formed around a set of related projects with common governance, which often produce artifacts shared among all projects. It helps to think of a portfolio of project communities as an ecology, in which the projects are mutually dependent, and there is both cross-project collaboration and competition for resources among the communities. As a case study, we explore the ecology of communities within the Apache project, one of the largest and most visible open source projects. We infer the community structure from developer mailing lists, and study how the communities evolve and interact over time. The analysis lends support to the often-stated hypothesis that open source communities grow by a process of preferential attachment. However, we show that the influx of external developers is not the only factor affecting community growth. The structure and dynamics of a community is also impacted by inter-project information flow, and the migration of developers between projects (including the formation of spin-offs).Request access from your librarian to read this chapter's full text.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it