Reputation in an open source software community: Antecedents and impacts

A developer's reputation in the OSS community is determined by all the evaluations received from his or her peers. While a large body of studies focuses on the importance of developers' reputations in their participation motivations, there is still lack of understanding for two issues. First, which factors can lead to a high developer's reputation? Second, how does the overall reputation of the developers' in a project impact project success? In this study, we develop a theoretical model and conduct an empirical analysis in a large online open source community. The results show that a developer's reputation level is determined by his or her 1) coding quality, 2) the deviation of the commitment behavior, 3) community experience, and 4) collaboration experience. In addition, we find that the group with an overall higher level of reputation would achieve a better performance, while the individual reputation level deviation within the group would impair its technical success. The implications of our findings and the future research directions are then discussed.