The Structure of Cross-National Collaboration in Open-Source Software Development
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3746252.3761237.pdf
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8.25 MB
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Adobe PDF
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Author(s)
Xu, Henry
Yu, Katy
He, Hao
Fang, Hongbo
Vasilescu, Bogdan
Park, Patrick
Date Issued
November 10, 2025
Publisher
ACM|Proceedings of the 34th ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management
Citation
Henry Xu, Katy Yu, Hao He, Hongbo Fang, Bogdan Vasilescu, and Patrick S. Park. 2025. The Structure of Cross-National Collaboration in Open-Source Software Development. In Proceedings of the 34th ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM '25). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 3602–3611.
Version
Final published version
Abstract
Open-source software (OSS) development platforms, such as GitHub, expand the potential for cross-national collaboration among developers by lowering the geographic, temporal, and coordination barriers that limited software innovation in the past. However, research has shown that the technological affordances that facilitate cross-national collaboration do not uniformly benefit all countries. Using the GitHub Innovation Graph dataset, which aggregates the complete cross-country collaborations among the entire population of GitHub developers, we present quantitative evidence of deep-seated religious and cultural affinities, shared colonial histories, and geopolitical factors structuring the collaborations between non-U.S. country pairs that become visible when the overarching dominance of the U.S. is removed from the data. This study highlights the opportunities to develop decentralizing strategies to facilitate new collaborations between developers in non-U.S. countries, thereby fostering the development of novel, innovative solutions. More generally, this study also underscores the importance of contextualizing user behavior and knowledge management in information systems with long-term, macro-social conditions in which these systems are inextricably embedded.
Description
CIKM ’25, Seoul, Republic of Korea
MIT Department
Sloan School of Management
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Creative Commons Attribution
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1145/3746252.3761237
