Essays on Communities

Over the past two decades, open source communities have become an increasingly important provider of innovative solutions for firms. However, as communities are not tied to corporations via standard labor contracts, firms seeking to steer collective activity towards commercially relevant projects need to find alternative ways of incentivizing potential contributors. To do so effectively they still need to get an in-depth understanding of how such communities work. Online communities rely exclusively on the informal network structures as major information flow channels and hence represent an unique multi-layered organizational structure. Relying on the arguments from social network theory, in my study I seek to examine (data from GitHub platform) how the division of labor is performed in online communities and how contributors are capable to achieve various advantageous structural positions which allow them to extract value from networks, increase productivity and enhance their status within the community.