Seminar

Knowledge Spillovers in the Open Source Community

Tong Wang (University of Edinburgh)

November 15, 2017, 12:30–13:30

Room MS003

Digital Workshop

Abstract

Knowledge spillovers is regarded as one of the main advantages of the open source community. However, the factors that affects the effectiveness and efficiency remain unexplored. By studying a large dataset covering 13,000,000 open source projects from Github, I document evidence supporting both the numbers of collaborators and social network structure of the developers drive the success of a project, which suggests the existence of both direct and indirect channels of knowledge spillovers. Meanwhile, I also find that the level of developer activity (as measured by number of comments) is critical for indirect spillovers.

See also