Mining Email Archives and Simulating the Dynamics of Open-Source Project Developer Networks

In distributed open-source software projects, participation of developers is largely by a voluntary basis. Programmers are not only free to join in or to leave the project, but they are also free to choose who they interact with, and how much they contribute to the project. In that sense, open-source project developers form a dynamic social network. This paper presents a measure to represent the interactions of distributed open-source software developers and utilizes data clustering techniques to mine their email archives to derive a representation of the associated social network. This method is applied on case studies of three social networks from two open-source projects, Linux and KDE. The dynamics of the three networks are then analyzed and simulated using agent-based modeling techniques. Our study shows that the three open-source developer networks evolved over time with some predictable patterns.