What Leaders Really Do for Open Collaborations: Focusing on Open Source Software Development Projects

Abstract

Rapid advancements in the field of information communication technology (ICT) have enabled people to collaborate through the Internet. This study focuses on open-source software development, which develops complex software or web services autonomously. To verify the antecedents of the participation of developers for successful open-source software development, we examine the relationship of the leadership roles of the project leader, such as knowledge contribution, interactions, and quality control with the participation of individual developers. For data collection, we develop a web crawler using the Python programming language and collect 518 repositories from GitHub, which is one of the leading platforms for developing open source software. We find that the participation of developers is closely associated with leaders who actively contribute knowledge, interact with the developers, and ensure strict quality control. Furthermore, the software development phase moderates the relationship between quality control and the participation of individual developers.