Finding Self-organized Criticality in Collaborative Work via Repository Mining

In order to improve team productivity and the team interaction itself, as well as the willingness of occasional volunteers, it is interesting to study the dynamics underlying collaboration in a repository-mediated project and their mechanisms, because the mechanisms producing those dynamics are not explicit or organized from the top, which allows self organization to emerge from the collaboration and the way it is done. This is why finding if self-organization takes place and under which conditions will yield some insights on this process, and, from this, we can deduce some hints on how to improve it. In this paper we will focus on the former, examining repositories where collaborative writing of scientific papers by our research team is taking place show the characteristics of a critical state, which can be measured by the existence of a scale-free structure, long-distance correlations and pink noise when analyzing the size of changes and its time series. This critical state is reached via self-organization, which is why it is called self-organized criticality. Our intention is to prove that, although with different characteristics, most repositories independently of the number of collaborators and their real nature, self-organize, which implies that it is the nature of the interactions, and not the object of the interaction, which takes the project to a critical state. This critical state has already been established in a number of repositories with different types of projects, such as software or even literary works; we will also find if there is any essential difference between the macro measures of the states reached by these and the object of this paper.