Robustness of Multi-Project Knowledge Collaboration Network in Open Source Community

Multi-project parallelism is an important feature of open source communities (OSCs), and multi-project collaboration among users is a favorable condition for an OSC’s development. This paper studies the robustness of this type of community. Based on the characteristics of knowledge collaboration behavior and the large amount of semantic content generated from user collaboration in open source projects, we construct a directed, weighted, semantic-based multi-project knowledge collaboration network. Using analysis of the KCN’s structure and user attributes, nodes are divided into knowledge collaboration nodes and knowledge dissemination nodes that participate in either multi- or single-project collaboration. From the perspectives of user churn and behavior degradation, two types of failure modes are constructed: node failure and edge failure. Based on empirical data from the Local Motors open source vehicle design community, we then carry out a dynamic robustness analysis experiment. Our results show that the robustness of our constructed network varies for different failure modes and different node types: the network has (1) a high robustness to random failure and a low robustness to deliberate failure, (2) a high robustness to edge failure and a low robustness to node failure, and (3) a high robustness to the failure of single-project nodes (or their edges) and a low robustness to the failure of multi-project nodes (or their edges). These findings can be used to provide a more comprehensive and targeted management reference, promoting the efficient development of OSCs.