Coordination Across Open Source Software Communities: Findings from the Rails Ecosystem

While coordination of work within open source software (OSS) communities is well-researched, it is virtually unknown how work is coordinated across community boundaries. However, as OSS projects are often part of a larger digital ecosystem of interdependent artifacts and communities, cross-community coordination is a pertinent topic. We turn to the ecosystem around
Ruby on Rails to empirically explore this research gap. To this end, we scrutinize 96 coordination episodes among five interrelated OSS projects and identify four
cross-community coordination mechanisms: adaptation, upgrading, positioning, and departure. Each mechanism describes a distinct and stable arrangement to integrate contributions across community borders. After presenting our findings, we reason about the significance of the results on explaining generative change
in digital ecosystems.