Combining Institutional Analysis and Socio-Technical Networks

# Description

The paper presents an effort to understand the sustainability of open source software (OSS) projects by using a dual-view analysis that combines institutional analysis with socio-technical systems analysis. We extracted institutional rules and norms from OSS contributors' communications using linguistic approaches and constructed socio-technical networks based on collaboration records to represent each project's organizational structure. We applied these methods to a dataset of digital traces from 253 nascent OSS projects within the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) incubator and found that socio-technical and institutional features relate to each other and provide complimentary views into the progress of the ASF's OSS projects. The paper concludes that refining these combined analyses can help provide a more precise understanding of the synchronization between the evolution of institutional governance and organizational structure.

# Findings

We can effectively extract governance content from email discussions in the form of institutional statements, and they fall into 12 distinguishable topics.
Projects with different graduation (i.e., sustainability) outcomes differ in how much governance discussion occurs within their communities, and also in their socio-technical structure.
Self-sustained projects (i.e., graduated) have a more socially active community, achieving it within their first 3 months of incubation, and they demonstrate more active contributions to documentation and more active communication of policy guidance via institutional statements.
A project's socio-technical structure is temporally associated with the institutional communications that occur, depending on the role of the agent (mentor, committer, contributor) communicating institutional statements.

# Paper

The paper can be found here.