TY - GEN
T1 - The Impacts of Lockdown on Open Source Software Contributions during the COVID-19 Outbreak
AU - Hu, Jin
AU - Hu, Daning
AU - Yang, Xuan
AU - Chau, Michael
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2022 IEEE Computer Society. All rights reserved.
PY - 2022
Y1 - 2022
N2 - We leverage the lockdown of Wuhan, China in January 2020 in response to COVID-19 as a natural experiment to study its impacts on individuals' contributions to open source software (OSS) on GitHub - the world's largest OSS platform. We find that Wuhan developers' contributions decreased by 10.2% relative to those in Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan (HMT) regions in the five weeks after the lockdown. Moreover, the contributions of Wuhan developers who interacted more with local developers on GitHub were reduced more after the lockdown. We conjecture that the lack of face-to-face (F2F) collaboration for Wuhan developers is the main driver of their reduced contributions, providing important insights for OSS platforms and stakeholders.
AB - We leverage the lockdown of Wuhan, China in January 2020 in response to COVID-19 as a natural experiment to study its impacts on individuals' contributions to open source software (OSS) on GitHub - the world's largest OSS platform. We find that Wuhan developers' contributions decreased by 10.2% relative to those in Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan (HMT) regions in the five weeks after the lockdown. Moreover, the contributions of Wuhan developers who interacted more with local developers on GitHub were reduced more after the lockdown. We conjecture that the lack of face-to-face (F2F) collaboration for Wuhan developers is the main driver of their reduced contributions, providing important insights for OSS platforms and stakeholders.
UR - https://www.scopus.com/pages/publications/85152234700
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85152234700
T3 - Proceedings of the Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences
SP - 316
EP - 325
BT - Proceedings of the 55th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, HICSS 2022
A2 - Bui, Tung X.
T2 - 55th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, HICSS 2022
Y2 - 3 January 2022 through 7 January 2022
ER -