  Open Source Software (OSS) forms much of the fabric of our digital society,
especially successful and sustainable ones. But many OSS projects do not become
sustainable, resulting in abandonment and even risks for the world's digital
infrastructure. Prior work has looked at the reasons for this mainly from two
very different perspectives. In software engineering, the focus has been on
understanding success and sustainability from the socio-technical perspective:
the OSS programmers' day-to-day activities and the artifacts they create. In
institutional analysis, on the other hand, emphasis has been on institutional
designs (e.g., policies, rules, and norms) that structure governance. Even
though each is necessary for a comprehensive understanding of OSS projects, the
connection and interaction between the two approaches have been barely
explored.
  In this paper, we make the first effort toward understanding OSS project
sustainability using a dual-view analysis, by combining institutional analysis
with socio-technical systems analysis. In particular, we (i) use linguistic
approaches to extract institutional rules and norms from OSS contributors'
communications to represent the evolution of their governance systems, and (ii)
construct socio-technical networks based on longitudinal collaboration records
to represent each project's organizational structure. We combined the two
methods and applied them to a dataset of developer traces from 253 nascent OSS
projects within the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) incubator. We find that
the socio-technical and institutional features relate to each other, and
provide complementary views into the progress of the ASF's OSS projects.
Refining these combined analyses can help provide a more precise understanding
of the synchronization between the evolution of institutional governance and
organizational structure.
