Abstract: The developers in open source software community have the characteristics of mobility. Effectively identifying and protecting core developers can better promote the emergence of collective innovation. Taking AngularJS as an example, the knowledge collaboration network is built by collecting the developers' submission record on GitHub. By adopting the social network analysis method, based on the original degree centrality and betweenness centrality, the community structure of developers is taken into account to propose new evaluation indicators. The TOPSIS multi-attribute decision-making method is used to identify the a core developers. The loss of core members is simulated to explore the effect of identification. The study finds that the core developers identified by the indicators considering the community structure have greater similarity to the core developers identified by the previous indicators, and all of them have certain accuracy compared with the real list. However, in the ranking of importance, the indicators considering the community structure are more effective.

Key words: open source software community, AngularJS, knowledge collaboration network, core developers identification