Dr. Christian Zingg

My research examines the impact that shocks such as the departure of key individuals have on social systems and their subsequent recovery. I develop and analyse statistical resilience measures that are, for example, based on entropies and which are computationally efficient. This enables me to study the resilience of systems with hundreds of individuals and analyse their evolution over multiple years.

The social systems that I study are primarily teams of Open Source Software developers on online platforms such as GitHub. I follow a data-driven approach by mining and analysing hundreds of Gigabytes of data to track the interactions between developers based on their public activities.

By studying the effects of shocks on software development teams, I aim to develop strategies to promote their resilience and sustainability. Through this research, I hope to contribute to our understanding of how these teams respond to disruptions and how they can be supported to recover quickly and efficiently.