Modeling Recruitment and Role Migration Processes in OSSD Projects

Overview

Socio-technical processes have come to the forefront of recent analyses of the Open Source Software Development (OSSD) world. Though there many anecdotal accounts of these processes, such narratives lack the precision of more formal modeling techniques, which are needed if these processes are going to be systematically analyzed, simulated, or re-enacted. Interest in making these processes explicit is mounting, both from the commercial side of the industry, as well as among spectators who may become contributors to OSSD organization. Thus, the work discussed in this paper serves to close this gap by analyzing and modeling recruitment and role transition processes across three prominent OSSD communities whose software development processes were previously examined: Mozilla.org, the Apache community, and NetBeans.