Organisation of work in Open Source Projects: expended effort and efficiency

In this paper we will discuss the organization of work which is found to be present in open source projects, and the implications for the expended effort as well as achieved efficiency. The paper is based on several empirical analyses of open source communities. The main method employed is mining the associated software repositories which are publicly available and contain records of past interactions between participants, or between participants and the repository itself. We will present a short overview concerning this methodology, and reference some papers which deal with the technicalities in more details. The main focus will be the discussion of some principles of work organization found in open source projects: this includes foremost the high concentration on a few heads, which consistently turns up in any empirical study. A second main focal point will be the estimated effort expended for open source development projects, which in comparison to commercial organizational settings seems to be quite small. We will try to formulate an organizational model based on the chief programmer team organization proposed decades ago to merge and reconcile these results.