[{"data":1,"prerenderedAt":-1},["ShallowReactive",2],{"doc-detail-86361-en":3,"doc-seo-86361-105":29,"detail-sidebar-cat-0-en-105":90},{"code":4,"msg":5,"data":6},0,"success",{"doc_id":7,"user_id":8,"nickname":9,"user_avatar":10,"doc_module":4,"category_id":11,"category_name":12,"doc_title":13,"doc_description":14,"doc_content":15,"file_id":16,"file_url":17,"file_type":18,"file_size":19,"view_count":4,"is_deleted":4,"is_public":20,"is_downloadable":20,"audit_status":20,"page_count":21,"language":22,"language_code":23,"site_id":24,"html_lang":23,"table_of_contents":25,"faqs":26,"seo_title":13,"seo_description":14,"update_tm":27,"read_time":28},86361,687197100911,"Himbo","https://ap-avatar.wpscdn.com/avatar/a000239b6f1da00475?x-image-process=image/resize,m_fixed,w_180,h_180&k=1782698725881665579",8,"Research & Report","Bursts and Triggers Socially Driven Activity in Open Source Co Editing Networks","Long-term sustainability of open source software communities depends on developer activity, yet the social mechanisms behind it remain unclear. By analyzing commit histories across 51 major OSS communities, the study finds contributions are strongly time-bursty. A temporal co-editing network model detects activity triggers: episodes where one developer edits another’s code and is followed by an unusually rapid response, forming cascades. Using a null model that removes temporal order, significant cascades appear in 28 of 51 projects, with prevalence varying across thresholds. Scale is the dominant factor, and cascade signals only weakly aid churn prediction.","Bursts and Triggers: Socially-Driven Activity in Open-Source Co-Editing Networks  \nLisi Qarkaxhija 1 , Maximilian Capraro2 , Stefan Menzel3 , Bernhard Sendhoff3 , Ingo Scholtes 1  \n1 CAIDAS, Julius-Maximilians-Universitt W¨urzburg, Germany  \n2DATEV eG, N¨urnberg, Germany  \n3Honda Research Institute Europe, Offenbach am Main, Germany  \n{lisi.qarkaxhija, [ingo.scholtes](ingo.scholtes}@uni-wuerzburg.de)[}](ingo.scholtes}@uni-wuerzburg.de)[@uni-wuerzburg.de](ingo.scholtes}@uni-wuerzburg.de), [maximilian.capraro@datev.de](maximilian.capraro@datev.de),  \n{stefan.menzel, [bernhard.sendhoff](bernhard.sendhoff}@honda-ri.de)[}](bernhard.sendhoff}@honda-ri.de)[@honda-ri.de](bernhard.sendhoff}@honda-ri.de)  \narXiv :2509 .26 173v 3 [ cs . SE] 13 Jul 2026  \nAbstract—The long-term sustainability of Open Source Software (OSS) communities depends on the activity of their developers, yet the social mechanisms driving this collective behavior remain poorly understood. Analyzing commit histories across 51 major OSS communities, we find that developer contributions are strongly “bursty” in time. To test whether this burstiness reflects social responsiveness rather than individual habit alone, we model developer interactions as temporal co-editing networks and introduce a method to detect activity triggers, episodes in which one developer editing another’s code is followed by an unusually rapid response, and the cascades they form. Benchmarking these against a null model that destroys the temporal ordering of co-edits while preserving each developer’s activity rate, we find statistically significant cascades in 28 of 51 projects (55%) under our default configuration, though prevalence ranges from 24% to 82% across detection thresholds. Whether a project exhibits significant cascades is governed primarily by its scale rather than governance or commit concentration. Finally, asa secondary application, we test whether these signals inform developer churn: features capturing the recent (in)activity of a developer’s collaborators add some predictive value, but a developer’s own inactivity dominates, propagation over the coediting graph adds little, and simple models match graph neural networks. Our results characterize developer responsiveness asa measurable component of collective OSS dynamics.  \nIndex Terms—Open Source Software, Social Networks, Activity Cascades, Collaborative Development, Network Analysis  \nI. INTRODUCTION  \nOpen source software (OSS) development represents oneof the most successful forms of large-scale collaborative knowledge work in the digital age [1], [2] . Understanding the social mechanisms that enable thousands of distributed developers to effectively coordinate their work is fundamental to comprehend how complex software systems emerge from decentralized collaboration [3], [4] . To this end, numerous studies in empirical software engineering have considered human and social aspects such as the motivation of individual developers [5], [6], the influence of project governance structures and team size [7]–[9] as well as the role of (temporal) collaboration and communication networks [10], [11] .  \nAn interesting yet less studied aspect of collective social dynamics in OSS communities are temporal patterns of developer contributions, i.e. at which times developers contribute to a project. Human activities are often characterized by“bursty” dynamics, where short periods of intense activity  \nare followed by long periods of inactivity [12], [13] . Such patterns are a hallmark for the influence of complex memory and triggering effects, i.e. one action influencing the timing of subsequent actions, which invalidates simple Poissonian models for memoryless events independently occurring at a constant rate. Such memory effects can naturally arise due to individual human behavior, since humans are likely to exhibit bursts in which they perform sequences of similar actions within a short time period. However, apart from this exogenous ex","cbCaiuRa9vmHiZBf","https://ap.wps.com/l/cbCaiuRa9vmHiZBf","pdf",347710,1,12,"English","en",105,"# Abstract\n# Introduction\n## Research Questions and Hypotheses","[{\"question\":\"What does the document investigate about OSS community sustainability?\",\"answer\":\"It investigates which social mechanisms drive collective developer activity that supports long-term sustainability of OSS communities.\"},{\"question\":\"How are “activity triggers” and “activity cascades” defined and detected?\",\"answer\":\"Activity triggers are episodes where one developer edits another’s code followed by an unusually rapid response; activity cascades are the resulting cascades formed through temporal co-editing interactions.\"},{\"question\":\"What factors most influence whether significant cascades are observed, and how do they relate to developer churn?\",\"answer\":\"Whether cascades are significant is governed primarily by project scale rather than governance or commit concentration; for churn prediction, recent collaborator (in)activity adds limited value, while the developer’s own inactivity dominates and propagation adds little.\"}]",1784210896,30,{"code":4,"msg":30,"data":31},"ok",{"site_id":24,"language":23,"slug":32,"title":13,"keywords":33,"description":14,"schema_data":34,"social_meta":85,"head_meta":87,"extra_data":89,"updated_unix":27},"bursts-and-triggers-socially-driven-activity-in-open-source-co-editing-networks","",{"@graph":35,"@context":84},[36,53,67],{"@type":37,"itemListElement":38},"BreadcrumbList",[39,43,47,50],{"item":40,"name":41,"@type":42,"position":20},"https://docshare.wps.com","Home","ListItem",{"item":44,"name":45,"@type":42,"position":46},"https://docshare.wps.com/document/","Document",2,{"item":48,"name":12,"@type":42,"position":49},"https://docshare.wps.com/document/research-report/",3,{"item":51,"name":13,"@type":42,"position":52},"https://docshare.wps.com/document/bursts-and-triggers-socially-driven-activity-in-open-source-co-editing-networks/86361/",4,{"url":51,"name":13,"@type":54,"author":55,"headline":13,"publisher":57,"fileFormat":60,"inLanguage":23,"description":14,"dateModified":61,"datePublished":61,"encodingFormat":60,"isAccessibleForFree":62,"interactionStatistic":63},"DigitalDocument",{"name":9,"@type":56},"Person",{"url":40,"name":58,"@type":59},"DocShare","Organization","application/pdf","2026-07-16",true,{"@type":64,"interactionType":65,"userInteractionCount":4},"InteractionCounter",{"@type":66},"ViewAction",{"@type":68,"mainEntity":69},"FAQPage",[70,76,80],{"name":71,"@type":72,"acceptedAnswer":73},"What does the document investigate about OSS community sustainability?","Question",{"text":74,"@type":75},"It investigates which social mechanisms drive collective developer activity that supports long-term sustainability of OSS communities.","Answer",{"name":77,"@type":72,"acceptedAnswer":78},"How are “activity triggers” and “activity cascades” defined and detected?",{"text":79,"@type":75},"Activity triggers are episodes where one developer edits another’s code followed by an unusually rapid response; activity cascades are the resulting cascades formed through temporal co-editing interactions.",{"name":81,"@type":72,"acceptedAnswer":82},"What factors most influence whether significant cascades are observed, and how do they relate to developer churn?",{"text":83,"@type":75},"Whether cascades are significant is governed primarily by project scale rather than governance or commit concentration; for churn prediction, recent collaborator (in)activity adds limited value, while the developer’s own inactivity dominates and propagation adds little.","https://schema.org",{"og:url":51,"og:type":86,"og:title":13,"og:site_name":58,"og:description":14},"article",{"robots":88,"canonical":51},"index,follow",{"doc_id":7,"site_id":24},{"code":4,"msg":5,"data":91},[92,96,100,104,109,114,119,121,126,129,133],{"id":20,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":45,"category_name":93,"show_sort_weight":94,"slug":95},"Story & Novel",90,"story-novel",{"id":46,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":45,"category_name":97,"show_sort_weight":98,"slug":99},"Literature",80,"literature",{"id":52,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":45,"category_name":101,"show_sort_weight":102,"slug":103},"Exam",70,"exam",{"id":105,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":45,"category_name":106,"show_sort_weight":107,"slug":108},5,"Comic",60,"comic",{"id":110,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":45,"category_name":111,"show_sort_weight":112,"slug":113},6,"Technology",50,"technology",{"id":115,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":45,"category_name":116,"show_sort_weight":117,"slug":118},7,"Healthcare",40,"healthcare",{"id":11,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":45,"category_name":12,"show_sort_weight":28,"slug":120},"research-report",{"id":122,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":45,"category_name":123,"show_sort_weight":124,"slug":125},9,"Religion & Spirituality",20,"religion-spirituality",{"id":124,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":45,"category_name":127,"show_sort_weight":124,"slug":128},"World Cup","world-cup",{"id":130,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":45,"category_name":131,"show_sort_weight":130,"slug":132},10,"Lifestyle","lifestyle",{"id":134,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":45,"category_name":135,"show_sort_weight":105,"slug":136},19,"General","general"]