Coding together – coding alone:
the role of trust in collaborative programming

Code and data accompanying the work to produce figures of the paper 'Coding together – coding alone: the role of trust in collaborative programming'.

Published here:

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1369118X.2020.1749699

Author accepted manuscript (pre-print):

http://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/8rf2h/

Description

Last modified: 10 July 2020
Authors: Fabian Stephany, Fabian Braesemann, Mark Graham
Licence: CC-BY (4.0)
Feel free to copy, redistribute, transform, and build upon the material, but please give appropriate credit, i.e. cite our work.

Abstract: In the digital economy, innovation processes increasingly rely on highly specialised know-how and open-source software shared on digital platforms on collaborative programming. The information that feeds into the content on these platforms is provided voluntarily by a vast crowd of knowledgeable users from all over the world. In contributing to the platforms, users invest their time and share knowledge with strangers to add to the rising body of digital knowledge. This requires an open mindset and trust. In this study, we argue that such a mindset is not just an individual asset but determined by the local communities the users are embedded in. We, therefore, hypothesise that places with higher levels of trust should contribute more to Stack Overflow, the world’s largest question-and-answer platform for programming questions. In relating the city-level contributions of 266 OECD metropolitan areas to infrastructure, economic, and trust measures, we find support for this hypothesis. In contrast, click rates to the platform are solely driven by infrastructure and economic variables, but not by trust. These findings highlight the importance of societal values in the twenty-first-century knowledge economy: if policymakers want to develop a lively local digital economy, it is not enough to provide fast Internet access and business opportunities. Instead, it is equally important to establish a trust-building environment that fosters sharing of innovative ideas, collaborations, and knowledge spillovers.

Keywords: Digital knowledge economy; Social data science; platform innovation; collaborative programming; stack overflow; trust

Contact: For any questions or inquiries, please feel free to reach out: fabian.braesemann@sbs.ox.ac.uk

Folder Structure

In this repository, we provide all the data and code to replicate the results presented in the paper.

.
+-- Code
|
|   +-- CTCA Figure.R (R code to produce Figure 1A, 1B, 1C, and 2A)
|   +-- CTCA Regressions.R (R code to produce Figure 2B, 2C, and Appendix Figure 1)
|
+-- Data
|   +-- coding_alone.RData (Data to reproduce the regressions and Figure 1)
|   +-- coding_alone_top_cities.RData (Data to reproduce Figure 1)
|   +-- cities_pop.csv (Data to reproduce Figure 1)
|                                   
+-- readme.md

Reference

Please cite as follows

@article{doi:10.1080/1369118X.2020.1749699,
author = {Fabian Stephany and Fabian Braesemann and Mark Graham},
title = {Coding together – coding alone: the role of trust in collaborative programming},
journal = {Information, Communication \& Society},
volume = {0},
number = {0},
pages = {1-18},
year  = {2020},
publisher = {Routledge},
doi = {10.1080/1369118X.2020.1749699},
URL = {https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2020.1749699},
eprint = {https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2020.1749699}
}