MEASURING RESILIENCE OF SOCIAL ORGANIZATIONS USING ENTROPY A TEMPORAL CASE STUDY FROM OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT
Social organizations are ubiquitous in our everyday life, ranging from the project team we are working in to the special interest group we are contributing to, online. For our study, we focus on communities of software developers from Open Source Software projects such as the Gentoo Linux operating system, or the igraph programming library. The developers in such a community collaborate with the goal to develop and maintain their particular Open Source Software. In order to survive, these communities have to mitigate issues such as software malfunctions, or losses of keydevelopers. To solve these issues, the developers can interact with their peers, for example, to distribute tasks, to discuss possible solutions, to write code together, etc. We argue that the more ways there are in which different developers can interact, the broader is the repertoire of possible solutions the community can come up with. However, how the developers interact, is subject to constraints. For example, if two developers have to interact often to develop a particular software component together, they have less time available to interact with other peers. Our aim is to develop a method to assess how strongly the interactions among all developers in a community are restricted by such constraints.