Presence of Location-Based Agglomeration Effects in Open Source Communities: An Empirical Test on GitHub
B. Veeresh Thummadi, Srikanth Paruchuri · Academy of Management Discoveries · 2021
Open source communities are a distinct form of organizing, and, in the present paper, we investigate the presence of location-based agglomeration effects in these communities. While it is clear that an open source community transcends multiple geographic locations, we do not yet know whether location-based agglomeration effects are present in these communities. We take a critical look at this aspect by investigating whether new and spin-off project initiations are more concentrated in geographic locations that already have many prior projects initiated in those regions, even after accounting for the locations’ endowments. Using data from a popular open source community (GitHub) from years 2008 to 2011 inclusive, we find the presence of not only agglomeration effects but also aggregation diseconomies beyond a certain level. Our findings have implications for research on open source communities and agglomeration effects, in addition to generating practical implications.