Collective Attention Configurations in Open-Source Software Development: Interlacing for High Performance1

Coordinating open-source software (OSS) development requires both the division and integration of developers’ attention. How to combine these contradictory logics effectively, however, remains unclear. Adopting a configurational lens, we distinguish between developers’ primary attention, or their top-priority focus, and secondary attention, or their spare capacity. Along these two lines, division and integration take on different forms. Recombining these forms yields two new coordination logics: interlacing, which combines primary division with secondary integration, and interlocking, which combines primary integration with secondary division. Applying the same or different logics across OSS’s two key work types—discursive and technical—produces a broader set of coordination configurations. Analyzing 4,291 release cycles from 1,004 GitHub machine-learning projects, we find that isomorphic interlacing—applying interlacing in both work types—delivers the strongest performance of development speed, novelty, and quality. Configurations pairing interlacing with division or integration also perform well under particular contingencies of task interdependence, project ownership, and release-cycle length. By contrast, configurations involving interlocking consistently underperform. Our study advances OSS coordination theory by identifying a high-performing configuration that systematically combines division and integration and clarifying when alternative configurations can substitute for it.