Understanding organization and open source community relations through the attraction-selection-attrition model

Organizations increasingly engage with open source communities. Extant research identified the benefits to organizations for engaging with open source and documented how open source communities operate to accommodate organizational engagement. The complexities involved in what attracts organizations to specific communities, how they choose to engage, and how subsequently the organizational-communal engagement shapes the community and organization are not yet well understood. In this paper, we explore how the Attraction-Selection-Attrition Model supports the study of how communities attract, retain, and lose members, and how these aspects relate to organizational-communal engagement between organizations and open source communities. This conceptual paper provides an introduction to the ASA model, having briefly outlined the lack of research connecting ASA and open source communities. Following this, the paper outlines how existing research related to the ASA model may be effectively related to existing open source research, resulting in several questions for future research.