Developers’ Progression from Periphery to Core in the Linux Kernel Development Project
Marvin Hanisch, Carolin Haeussler, Stefan Berreiter, Sven Apel · Academy of Management Proceedings · 2018
To coordinate activities between developers, open source software (OSS) communities assign roles of lateral authority to some developers. Prior research has mainly described the characteristics of and functional roles within these virtual organizations, but few have examined which community members take on roles of lateral authority, or investigated what drives the progression of developers from peripheral roles to core roles. We develop and test a theoretical framework, which explains developers’ pace of progression from periphery to core through technical contributions and communication activity. Our approach differs from prior research by highlighting the moderating role of developers’ focus regarding their community engagement. Using unique longitudinal data from the Linux kernel development project, our results suggest that the positive influence of technical contributions is negatively moderated when developers make broad, rather than focused, contributions to different subsystems. Conversely, the positive effect of communication activity is amplified the more developers engage in conversations on different topics and the more they respond to the queries of other community members. Our findings contribute to research on lateral governance in OSS communities, and to the more general debate on the benefits of specialization.