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Cited by 22Open Source Software InnovationsSoftware Engineering Techniques and PracticesSoftware Engineering Research

Open Source Software Sustainability: Combining Institutional Analysis and Socio-Technical Networks

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Yin, Likang, Chakraborti, Mahasweta, Yan, Yibo, Schweik, Charles, Frey, Seth, Filkov, Vladimir·2022·Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction
DOI 10.1145/3555129
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Abstract

Sustainable Open Source Software (OSS) forms much of the fabric of our digital society, especially successful and sustainable ones. But many OSS projects do not become sustainable, resulting in abandonment and even risks for the world's digital infrastructure. Prior work has looked at the reasons for this mainly from two very different perspectives. In software engineering, the focus has been on understanding success and sustainability from the socio-technical perspective: the OSS programmers' day-to-day activities and the artifacts they create. In institutional analysis, on the other hand, emphasis has been on institutional designs (e.g., policies, rules, and norms) that structure project governance. Even though each is necessary for a comprehensive understanding of OSS projects, the connection and interaction between the two approaches have been barely explored. In this paper, we make the first effort toward understanding OSS project sustainability using a dual-view analysis, by combining institutional analysis with socio-technical systems analysis. In particular, we (i) use linguistic approaches to extract institutional rules and norms from OSS contributors' communications to represent the evolution of their governance systems, and (ii) construct socio-technical networks based on longitudinal collaboration records to represent each project's organizational structure. We combined the two methods and applied them to a dataset of developer digital traces from 253 nascent OSS projects within the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) incubator. We find that the socio-technical and institutional features relate to each other, and provide complimentary views into the progress of the ASF's OSS projects. Refining these combined analyses can help provide a more precise understanding of the synchronization between the evolution of institutional governance and organizational structure.

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  • As OSS projects grow in scale and complexity, informal governance arrangements often become insufficient for ensuring accountability, transparency, and continuity.

    “As OSS projects grow in scale and complexity, empirical studies indicate that informal governance arrangements often become insufficient for ensuring accountability, transparency, and continuity [24, 56].”

    From Governance in Practice: How Open Source Projects Define and Document Roles (2026) · cites this paper as [56]

    Section 2.3 says governance must adapt as an organization’s context changes, and the Discussion reports an association between more active institutional governance and OSS project graduation. The paper does not establish that growth in scale or complexity makes informal governance insufficient, or that this insufficiency threatens accountability, transparency, and continuity. (LLM, conf=0.83)

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Cited by

Sorted by citations

Authors
Yin, L., Chakraborti, M., Yan, Y., Schweik, C., Frey, S., & Filkov, V.
Affiliations
  • University of California, Davis (US)
  • University of Massachusetts Amherst (US)
ORCID
Venue
Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction
Publisher
Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
Published
2022-11-07
Volume
6
Issue
CSCW2
Pages
1-23
ISSN
2573-0142 (ISSN-L)
DOI
10.1145/3555129
OpenAlex
W4309757097
Cited by
22
References
1
Citations by year
2026: 10 · 2025: 3 · 2024: 6 · 2023: 2 · 2022: 1
FWCI
2.32
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
Licence
Locations
  • Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction (publishedVersion, other-oa)
  • arXiv (Cornell University) (submittedVersion)
  • arXiv (Cornell University) (cc-by)
Funders
NSF (2020751,2020900)
Topics
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Science Applications › Open Source Software Innovations
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Information Systems › Software Engineering Techniques and Practices
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Information Systems › Software Engineering Research
Keywords
institutional analysis, sociotechnical networks, developer communication, organizational structure, project abandonment, collaborative software development

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