Contributions by individual open source software (OSS) community members are the lifeblood of the OSS projects that power today’s digital economy and are important for the very survival of such communities. Individual contributions by OSS community members to others’ projects and their own determine whether OSS communities are resilient in the face of major shocks. Arguably, if crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic prompt users to reduce their contributions to others’ projects relative to the contributions to their own projects, such behavior can have implications for the overall resilience of the OSS community. Therefore, whether and how individuals change their contributions in the face of a crisis is an important question. We examine whether members in an OSS community increased or decreased their contributions to others’ projects relative to their own in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, a sudden and unexpected global health-related shock that has affected almost everyone. We also compare and contrast this behavior when the OSS community faced increasing unemployment, an economic cyclic shock that is arguably and relatively more personal. Drawing on the concept of prosocial behavior and conservation of resources (COR) theory, we hypothesize that the pandemic increased OSS community members’ contributions to others’ projects relative to their own; on the other hand, the threat of rising unemployment decreased OSS community members’ contributions to others’ projects relative to their own. Our empirical analyses of a longitudinal dataset of over 18,000 OSS community members on GitHub, with more than 1.4 million member-day observations, support our hypotheses. This study contributes by uncovering the differential effects of exogenous health-related and economic shocks on the resilience of the OSS community. We conclude with a discussion of our findings’ implications for OSS community resilience.

ABSTRACTAlthough the spread of misinformation on centralized social media platforms has received significant attention, few studies compare centralized and decentralized platforms, and how to mitigate misinformation diffusion in newly emerging blockchain‐based decentralized social network platforms. We study misinformation diffusion between the decentralized and the centralized platforms and identify three decentralized governance mechanisms to mitigate the spread of misinformation in decentralized networks: user flagging, user article ratings, and user reputation. Our empirical experiments using agent‐based simulations leveraging real‐world data from two platforms reveal two findings. First, comparing misinformation diffusion between the decentralized Steemit and the centralized Pokec platforms suggests that in the absence of any mitigation mechanisms, misinformation in decentralized platforms affects more users, at faster rates, and reaches shorter distance from the misinformation initiating user. Second, within the decentralized platforms, misinformation affects fewer users, at slower rates, and reaches shorter distance from the misinformation initiating user in the presence of mitigating mechanisms than in their absence. We discuss the implications of these results both for the understanding of misinformation diffusion and for the governance of decentralized social network platforms.