Empirical research on the evaluation model and method of sustainability of the open source ecosystem

The development of open source brings new thinking and production modes to software engineering and computer science, and establishes a software development method and ecological environment in which groups participate. Regardless of investors, developers, participants, and managers, they are most concerned about whether the Open Source Ecosystem can be sustainable to ensure that the ecosystem they choose will serve users for a long time. Moreover, the most important quality of the software ecosystem is sustainability, and it is also a research area in Symmetry. Therefore, it is significant to assess the sustainability of the Open Source Ecosystem. However, the current measurement of the sustainability of the Open Source Ecosystem lacks universal measurement indicators, as well as a method and a model. Therefore, this paper constructs an Evaluation Indicators System, which consists of three levels: The target level, the guideline level and the evaluation level, and takes openness, stability, activity, and extensibility as measurement indicators. On this basis, a weight calculation method, based on information contribution values and a Sustainability Assessment Model, is proposed. The models and methods are used to analyze the factors affecting the sustainability of Stack Overflow (SO) ecosystem. Through the analysis, we find that every indicator in the SO ecosystem is partaking in different development trends. The development trend of a single indicator does not represent the sustainable development trend of the whole ecosystem. It is necessary to consider all of the indicators to judge that ecosystem’s sustainability. The research on the sustainability of the Open Source Ecosystem is helpful for judging software health, measuring development efficiency and adjusting organizational structure. It also provides a reference for researchers who study the sustainability of software engineering

Make-or-buy configurational approaches in product-service ecosystems and performance

This research examines firm boundary configurations for manufacturers' product-service offerings. We argue that the building of a product-service ecosystem through collaboration with service providers in certain types of business services can increase performance as a result of the superior knowledge-based resources coming from specialized partners. By using fuzzy set qualitative analysis on a sample of 370 multinational manufacturing enterprises (MMNEs), the results reveal that effective servitization is heterogeneous across manufacturing industries and across business service offerings. The findings indicate that most industries achieve their highest performance through collaborations with value-added service providers in two out of three of the service continuum stages (Base and Intermediate services); while keeping the development of Advanced services in-house. The results help to contextualize the best practices for implementing service business models in MMNEs by detailing which service capabilities should be retained in-house and which should be outsourced to specialized partners in various industrial contexts.Peer ReviewedPreprin

Sustainability Children\u27s Book

As human driven climate change continues to alter our planet, persuading the general public to adopt sustainable living practices has become increasingly important. Storytelling has long been a part of human culture, and recent studies have emphasized the power of storytelling to influence the audience as a means of changing behavior. This project attempted to teach sustainable principles to primary school children through the creation of a scientific children’s book. The book communicated the maxim of “reduce, reuse, recycle” by tracing a fictitious story of a town where children frequently buy new toys and throw the old toys away. The book explores the supply chain of toys and the market forces of supply and demand, focusing on the consumer’s responsibility to not over-consume, i.e “reduce”. It also presents the concept of “reusing” and “recycling” as alternatives to disposal of old toys. The book was evaluated for age appropriate language and concepts for K-5 students and adjusted to meet educational standards. It was then tested by reading it to a classroom of 2nd grade students. A discussion with the students following the reading showed that they understood the theme of the book and how they could apply it to their own lives. The project also included a life cycle analysis (LCA) of a stuffed animal, a representative toy from the story. The LCA showed that the largest contributors to the stuffed animal’s impacts were the production of cotton used for its outer layer and the electricity used in its assembly. It also showed the impacts most damaging to human health were chiefly a result of the fossil fuels used to provide process energy

Healthy or Not: A Way to Predict Ecosystem Health in GitHub

With the development of open source community, through the interaction of developers, the collaborative development of software, and the sharing of software tools, the formation of open source software ecosystem has matured. Natural ecosystems provide ecological services on which human beings depend. Maintaining a healthy natural ecosystem is a necessity for the sustainable development of mankind. Similarly, maintaining a healthy ecosystem of open source software is also a prerequisite for the sustainable development of open source communities, such as GitHub. This paper takes GitHub as an example to analyze the health condition of open source ecosystem and, also, it is a research area in Symmetry. Firstly, the paper presents the healthy definition of GitHub open source ecosystem health and, then, according to the main components of natural ecosystem health, the paper proposes the health indicators and health indicators evaluation method. Based on the above, the GitHub ecosystem health prediction method is proposed. By analyzing the projects and data collected in GitHub, it is found that, using the proposed evaluation indicators and method, we can analyze the healthy development trend of the GitHub ecosystem and contribute to the stability of ecosystem development

Living labs as a driver for change in regional television

Traditional television production and distribution organizations are increasingly being challenged by a rapidly changing technological environment. These evolutions force the television industry to leave their comfort zone. This context in mind, regional television broadcasters often lack the resources, knowledge and organizational flexibility to cope with this external pressure. In this paper, we discuss the use of Living Labs as ‘innovation intermediaries’ and ‘change facilitators’ that foster and enable user-centric innovation development processes, both inside and outside the organization. This phenomenon is approached from both an open innovation and a user innovation point of view. This paper considers Living Labs as open innovation ecosystems, enabling organizations to reach out and collaborate with their (potential) audience and other external actors, but also as an open ‘battle arena’ for the organization itself. The Living Lab process governs different expectations and enables conflicting opinions to come together and to steadily grow towards a mutual solution. Moreover, the innovation development process in the Living Lab seems to have innovation spill-over effects on the organizational level, catalyzing a broader organizational change

Information Technology Platforms: Definition and Research Directions

The concept of an information technology (IT) related platform is broad and covers phenomena ranging from the operating system Linux to the Internet. Such platforms are of increasing importance to innovation and value creation across many facets of industry and daily life. There is, however, a lack of common understanding in both research and industry about what is mean by the term platform when related to IT. This lack of consensus is detrimental to research and knowledge development. Thus, the aims of this study are to: (i) provide a sound definition of the IT-platform concept by identifying its distinguishing dimensions; and (ii) identify important current research directions for the IT-platform concept. To achieve these aims a systematic literature review was undertaken with 133 relevant articles taken from major information systems journals, conferences, and business publications. The study contributes by providing a sound base for future research into IT-platforms.Comment: Research-in-progress ISBN# 978-0-646-95337-3 Presented at the Australasian Conference on Information Systems 2015 (arXiv:1605.01032