This presentation will showcase recent work on the geography of open source software developers. Motivated by recent work showing that many positive externalities created by OSS developers accrue locally, we map active GitHub developers at various spatial scales.
Despite a strong correlation with economic development, OSS activity differs significantly across countries and regions in idiosyncratic ways. Within countries OSS developers are even more concentrated than R&D workers – suggesting that policymakers should consider cluster policy tools when seeking to promote OSS.