Advogato Online Open Source Community, 2000-2001

This study analyzed the evolution of the status hierarchy within a large-scale, natural setting. The results of empirical analyses of status ratings within a large online community of software developers showed that, in the process of status attainment, community members tended to evaluate a focal actor's reputation according to publicly available social references, such as the number and status of other evaluators. Ironically, these same social references also worked to produce constraint in an actor's status mobility. In order to manage the large amount of data, a custom-written JAVA script was used to extract the pertinent data from the XML code and then insert the data into a SQL database, from which it was possible to use standard query language to combine information from the discrete panels into a single ASCII data file.