Modeling and Simulation of a Complex Social System: A Case Study

The Open Source Software (OSS) development movement is a classic example of a social network. It is also a prototype of a complex evolving network. After over two years of collecting developer and project information from SourceForge, we have sufficient data to study the dynamic and structural mechanisms that govern the evolution and topology of this complex system. First, we collected empirical data from SourceForge and analyzed the statistics of the topological information of the OSS developer social network. By inspecting the network’s evolution over time, we were able to gain knowledge about the appearance of the complex network and characteristics of the system. Then we generated a model to depict the evolution of this network based on the statistical results we got from the empirical data. Finally, using Java/Swarm, we simulated the evolution of the OSS developer network using our model to compare against the empirical data. In simulation, we used several different models to replicate the empirical data: random network theory, scale-free network, scale-free network with constant fitness and scale-free networks with dynamic fitness. From these simulation iterations, we were able to verify and validate our model for this network and to increase our understanding of the OSS developer collaboration network.