The Structure of Cross-National Collaboration in Open-Source Software Development

Published: November 10, 2025

Authors: Henry Xu, Katy Yu, Hao He, Hongbo Fang, Bogdan Vasilescu, Patrick S. Park
Venue: The 2025 34th ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management
Links: [DOI] [PDF] [Code]

Abstract

Open-source software (OSS) development platforms, such as GitHub, expand the potential for cross-national collaboration among developers by lowering the geographic, temporal, and coordination barriers that limited software innovation in the past. However, as shown in previous research, these technological affordances that lower barriers for cross-national collaboration do not uniformly benefit all countries. Using the GitHub Innovation Graph dataset, which aggregates the complete cross-country collaborations among the entire population of GitHub developers, we show the overwhelming dominance of the U.S. in global OSS collaboration and, in stark contrast, the paucity of collaborations among the majority of non-Western country pairs in the data. However, by removing the U.S. and its ties from the collaboration network, we find quantitative evidence of deep-seated religious and cultural affinities, shared colonial histories, and geopolitical factors structuring the collaborations between non-U.S. country pairs. This study highlights the opportunities to develop decentralizing strategies to facilitate new collaborations between developers in non-U.S. countries, thereby fostering the development of novel, innovative solutions. More generally, this study also underscores the importance of contextualizing user behavior and knowledge management in information systems with long-term, macro-social conditions in which these systems are inextricably embedded.