The rapid emergence and dominance of online communities have broadened the imagination of social relationships. Previous studies noted that social capital can be bridged or bonded in heterogeneous online communities like Facebook (Kobayashi and Skoric, 2011; Steinfield, Ellison and Lampe, 2008) and can be also an antecedent factor of recreating “a second digital divide”(Zhao and Elesh, 2007), inequality of online social capital. However, different from bridging or bonding, the latter is a lack of empirical evidence.
GitHub, an international community of software developers, with the GHTorrent Project(Gousios and Spinellis, 2012) provides empirical possibilities. Within the framework of online social capital, this paper explores actors (N=70840) in this homogeneous and heterogeneous community within the data through Social Network Analysis.
Statically, the discrepancy of average degrees(2.703 for developed cities, 0.592 for underdeveloped cities) and average clustering coefficients (0.047 for developed cities, 0.023 for underdeveloped cities) of those communities in different cities shows vivid patterns geographically and economically. Dynamically, though the accumulation of OSC among individuals varies, static geographical and economical divides have been enlarged in six years (2008-2014). Cautiously, this study builds a linear model on the training set (data from 2008 to 2014) and the validation on the testing set (data from 2014-2016, 2017-2019 excluded in data cleaning) also confirms the findings.
The result not only confirms the ubiquity of geographical and economical digital inequality in Chinese developer communities but also suggests the failure of bringing decentralized techniques (Git, a free and open source distributed version control system) into an online community to bridge the digital divide or to realize absolute and ubiquitous democracy.
This empirical study implemented a practical method to evaluate inequality of online social capital, verified the enlarging digital divide in OSC, enriched the definition of online social capital, and furtherly reflected on the rationality of widely accepted “centralized-decentralized” binary opposition.