Research On Participation Behavior Characteristics And Influencing Factors Of Developers In Open Source Community

With the vigorous development of the open source movement,many outstanding open source developers have gathered in the open source community to develop open source software with the aid of the media of the network platform.They are often located in different regions of the world,use the Internet platform to communicate,cooperate in the development,maintenance and update of open source software under a certain collaborative mechanism,and contribute to the construction of open source communities.The success of open source communities and open source projects is inseparable from the hard contributions of many developers.But similar to many online communities,open source communities also face problems such as low user participation,uneven project quality,difficult project management,and insufficient project maintenance.Research on the behavioral characteristics and influencing factors of developers in the open source community is particularly important.In order to help the open source community and open source project managers grasp the behavioral preferences of different developers,evaluate the contribution of developers,and take corresponding measures to encourage developers to actively participate in the open source community contribution,this article collects the personal information of developers in the open source community Git Hub And behavioral data to conduct empirical research on the behavioral characteristics and influencing factors of developers in the open source community.This research is based on human dynamics,using statistical methods to analyze the characteristics of the developer's production behavior and communication behavior from the two aspects of the amount and time of the developer's participation behavior.Then based on the motivation theory,the factors affecting the participation behavior of developers are divided into individual internal factors and external social factors,and the seven factors of use demand,knowledge exchange,reputation,economic factors,identity identification,community guidance,and social feedback are proposed.The research hypothesis,using the method of multiple regression analysis,takes the quantitative characteristics of the developer's behavior as the dependent variable,and quantitatively analyzes the effect of each influencing factor.The results of the study confirm that there is a clear heterogeneity between the participation of developers in the open source community,and a small number of developers contribute most of the production behavior.At the same time,the production and communication behaviors of core developers are significantly higher than those of peripheral developers.In terms of time cyclicality,the cycle of the developer's production behavior and communication behavior is consistent with normal working hours.The participation behavior of developers is not a random process.The time interval distribution of participation behavior obeys the power-law distribution and has obvious fat-tail characteristics,which is consistent with the results of other human dynamics research.In terms of influencing factors,usage requirements,reputation,economic factors,identity tags,and social feedback have a significant positive impact on developers' communication behavior.Knowledge exchange,reputation,economic factors,and social feedback have a significant positive impact on the developer's production behavior,while usage requirements and community guidance have a significant negative impact on the developer's production behavior.This research provides relevant evidence for distinguishing developers' identity role schemes based on the number of developers' behaviors and the characteristics of developers' participating behaviors following a power-law distribution.It also helps the managers of the open source community understand the behavioral characteristics and influencing factors of developers participating in the open source community,and provides a basis for decision-making on the function setting and management measures of the open source community.Through this research,the author suggests that the open source community should set up an active and effective attention mechanism and comment feedback mechanism,which can significantly motivate developers to make contributions.