The Structural Dimension of Cooperation. Cooperation Networks as Cohesive Small Worlds

The last half of twentieth century has witnessed a key shift in the production process of knowledge: the most important discoveries and innovations in science and technology are not anymore the result of the work of very talented individuals working alone, but the result of cooperation and teamwork. The remarkable increase in scale of cooperation in knowledge intensive production processes has renewed the interest in analyzing the mechanisms by which large scale cooperation emerges and thrives. The two main theoretical approaches to cooperation are, on the one hand, a micro approach that considers cooperation as an atomic process in which cooperation is produced between two individuals and, on the other hand, as a macro level phenomenon in which the center of analysis is the collectively or group. The aim of this research is to bridge the gap between macro level and micro level approaches to cooperation by focusing on meso level mechanisms, which until recently have received little attention in the theoretical debate. I argue that a meso level approach has to focus on the structural dimension of cooperation, that is, the patterns of relations between the individuals that participate in production processes, what I call cooperation networks. This perspective shows that between the dyadic interactions among individuals, and the shared goals and values that guide large organizations and groups, there are subgroups of individuals that play a key role in enabling the kind of large scale cooperation that we have witnessed during the last decades. This research focuses on the case study of two large, mature, and successful Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) projects —the Debian operating system and the Python programming language— in order to build a structural theoretical framework that helps explain and understand how large scale cooperation works. I present a network model, that I name Cohesive Small World, which is based on two well established network models: the Small World model and the Structural Cohesion model. I propose that these two models are not mutually exclusive. The family of networks that fit in the intersection of both models exhibit consistent structural patterns. These patterns, I argue, provide the scaffolding for the emergence of collaborative communities, such as FOSS projects, and enable and foster effective large scale cooperation. On the one hand, the generation of trust and congruent values among heterogeneous individuals are fostered by structurally cohesive groups in the connectivity hierarchy of cooperation networks because individuals embedded in these structures are able to compare independent perspectives on each other through a variety of paths that flow through distinct sets of intermediaries, which provides multiple independent sources of information about each other. Thus, the perception of an individual embedded in such structures of the other members of the group to whom she is not directly linked is filtered by the perception of a variety of others whom she trusts because is directly linked to them. This mediated perception of the group generates trust at a global scale. On the other hand, the existence of dense local clusters connected between them by relative short paths allows successful cooperation among heterogeneous individuals with common interests and, at the same time, fosters the flow of information between these clusters preventing the local clusters to be trapped in echo chambers of like minded collaborators. I developed heuristics to compute the k-components structure, along with the average node connectivity for each k-component. These heuristics allow to compute the