Contributors’ enrollment in collaborative online communities: the case of OpenStreetMap

Abstract

The number of people registering in an online community depends on two main factors: interest in, and awareness of, the project. Registering to a project does not, however, imply contributing to it, as lacking the knowledge and skills can be a barrier to participation. In order to identify the nature of events that might have facilitated or hindered enrollments in the OpenStreetMap (OSM) project over time, we analyzed the correlations between the number of new participants and the events that dotted its history. Four different metrics were defined to characterize participants’ behaviors: the daily number of registrations, the daily number of participants that made a first contribution, the delays between contributors’ registration and their first edits, and a daily contribution ratio built from the number of new contributors and the number of new registered members. Time series analyses were used to identify trends, and outstanding variations of the number of participants. An inventory of events that took place along the OSM project’s history was created and appreciable variations of the metrics have been linked to events that seemed to be meaningful. Although a correlation does not imply causality, many of the explanations these correlations suggest are supported by the results of other studies, either directly or indirectly. For instance, when considering the time participants spend as “lurker”, as well as on the nature of the contribution of early participants. In other cases, they suggest new explanations for the origin of the spam accounts that affect registration statistics, or the decline in the proportion of registered members who actually become contributors.

Keywords:

• OpenStreetMap (OSM)
• contributors
• lurkers
• participation
• knowledge
• motivation