Week 5_Grewal et al.(2006)_Yiran

This paper examined the effects of network embeddedness—or the nature of the relationship among projects and developers—on the success of open source projects. The key of understanding this paper lies in knowing how authors operationalize the key concepts, social capital and network embeddedness. They view social capital as the relations among developers, including project managers, and projects that provide developers access to information and (perhaps) embedded resources. In this paper, they refer the effect of social capital as network embeddedness. The term “network embeddedness” was used to to capture the architecture of network ties, and then three sub-constructs are defined to represent network embeddedness, i.e., structural, junctional, and positional embeddedness. Specifically, they used degree centrality—the number of projects in which the manager participates—to operationalize structural embeddedness, betweenness centrality—the number of paths between other nodes on which the manager lies—to operationalize junctional embeddedness, and eigenvector centrality—the manager participates in important projects—to operationalize positional embeddedness.

The author argued that high-quality information should be more useful in newer projects, and the value of project manager embeddedness should decline as projects age. In this case, Technical success was measured as the number of concurrent versioning system (CVS) commits. With respect to commercial success of the project, since project network embeddedness would facilitate the dissemination of this information. they assumed that the valence of the salient reputation dimension is positive (negative), word of mouth should increase (decrease) the commercial success of the project. Thus, project network embeddedness can have a positive or a negative effect on commercial project success. Commercial success was  measured by the number of downloads over the life of a project.

Latent class regression analysis was used to show that multiple regimes exist and that some of the effects of network embeddedness are positive under some regimes and negative under others. The result confirmed that considerable heterogeneity exists in the network embeddedness of open source projects and project managers. Overall, the results for the effects of embeddedness are much stronger for technical success than for commercial success, implying that network embeddedness has a greater role to play in technical success than in commercial success.

Theoretically, this paper recognized that the effect of network embeddedness varies with the dependent variable, i.e., technical or commercial project success. Managerially, the results showed that projects with more developers see greater technical success in the later stages of project development, i.e., as the projects age.