Social media and success in open source projects.

ABSTRACTSocial media are being integrated into work environments. They have the potential to provide essential context and awareness, and increase work performance as a result. However, the specific effects of social media that impact productivity are not well understood. We perform a quantitative analysis of project success of over 5,000 open source software projects hosted on GitHub, a website that provides extensive social media functionality. Adapted from the open source literature, we develop two measures of project success, Developer Attention and Work Contribution. We find that projects with highly socially connected developers are not necessarily the most active or popular projects. Oddly, projects with a high level of developer multitasking, i.e., splitting effort equally across multiple projects, tend to receive less Developer Attention, but greater Work Contribution. Success on both measures is strongly positively associated with greater concentration of work among a small number of developers. We discuss the implications of the findings for social media in online production.