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Workings of Collective Intelligence within Open Source Communities

  • Conference paper
Advances in Social Computing (SBP 2010)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 6007))

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.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN, 37996

    Everett Stiles

  2. Computational Sciences and Engineering Division, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, TN, 37831-6085

    Xiaohui Cui

Authors
  1. Everett Stiles
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  2. Xiaohui Cui
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Sociology, University of Hawaii, 2424 Maile Way, Saunders Hall 237, 956-7234, Honolulu, HI, USA

    Sun-Ki Chai

  2. Air Force Research Laboratory, Rome Research Site, AFRL/RIEF, 525 Brooks Road, NY 13441, Rome, USA

    John J. Salerno

  3. Department of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research, National Institute of Health (NIH), 31 Center Drive, 20892-2027, Bethesda, MD, USA

    Patricia L. Mabry

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© 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Stiles, E., Cui, X. (2010). Workings of Collective Intelligence within Open Source Communities. In: Chai, SK., Salerno, J.J., Mabry, P.L. (eds) Advances in Social Computing. SBP 2010. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 6007. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-12079-4_35

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-12079-4_35

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-12078-7

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-12079-4

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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