Open Source Project Collapse – Sources and Patterns of Failure

Why do open source projects fail? Open source projects have gained tremendous momentum, in theory, managerial practice and global economy. However, a large number of projects are now dormant, collapsed, or abandoned. Even celebrated success stories lose developers and fail. Yet, failure is underexplored and our understanding of developer departure is limited. Previous literature has concentrated on prospering projects, attracting contributors, and expanding communities, but it is unclear why even well-integrated members leave and projects fail. This study explores open source project failure by drawing on ten in-depth open source software case studies and netnographic analyses. We identify antecedents of developer departure, discover patterns of project collapse, and reveal where members move. We complement the dominant research logic of how to facilitate membership on-boarding with the aspect of understanding de-boarding. Our results enhance our understanding of why and how open projects fail and involve implications for open organizations

Similarities, challenges and opportunities of wikipedia content and open source projects

Copyright @ 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.Several years of research and evidence have demonstrated that Open Source Software (OSS) portals often contain a large amount of software projects that simply do not evolve, developed by relatively small communities, struggling to attract a sustained number of contributors. These portals have started to increasingly act as a storage for abandoned projects, and researchers and practitioners should try and point out how to take advantage of such content. Similarly, other online content portals (like Wikipedia) could be harvested for valuable content. In this paper we argue that, even with differences in the requested expertise, many projects reliant on content and contributions by users undergo a similar evolution, and follow similar patterns: when a project fails to attract contributors, it appears to be not evolving, or abandoned. Far from a negative finding, even those projects could provide valuable content that should be harvested and identified based on common characteristics: by using the attributes of “usefulness” and “modularity” we isolate valuable content in both Wikipedia pages and OSS projects

Applying a Usability Technique in the Open Source Software Development Process: Experiences from the Trenches

The growth in the number of non-developer open source software (OSS) application users has drawn attention to usability in the OSS community. OSS communities do not generally know how to apply usability techniques and are unclear about which techniques to use in each activity of the development process. The aim of our research is to determine the feasibility of applying the focus groups technique in the OSS ERMaster project. To do this, we participated as project volunteers. We used the case study research method to investigate technique application and OSS community participation. As a result, we identified adverse conditions that were an obstacle to the application of the original technique. We then adapted the technique to make it applicable in an OSS project. We can conclude that was not easy to recruit OSS users and developers to participate in technique application

Users' participation to the design process in an Open Source Software online community

The objective of this research is to analyse the ways members of open-source software communities participate in design. In particular we focus on how users of an Open Source (OS) programming language (Python) participate in adding new functionalities to the language. Indeed, in the OS communities, users are highly skilled in computer sciences; they do not correspond to the common representation of end-users and can potentially participate to the design process. Our study characterizes the Python galaxy and analyses a formal process to introduce new functionalities to the language called Python Enhancement Proposal (PEP) from the idea of language evolution to the PEP implementation. The analysis of a particular pushed-by-users PEP from one application domain community (financial), shows: that the design process is distributed and specialized between online and physical interactions spaces; and there are some cross participants between users and developers communities which may reveal boundary spanners roles

Invisible Labor in Open Source Software Ecosystems

Invisible labor is work that is not fully visible, not appropriately compensated, or both. In open source software (OSS) ecosystems, essential tasks that do not involve code (like content moderation) often become invisible to the detriment of individuals and organizations. However, invisible labor is so difficult to measure that we do not know how much of OSS activities are invisible. Our study addresses this challenge, demonstrating that roughly half of OSS work is invisible. We do this by developing a survey technique with cognitive anchoring that measures OSS developer self-assessments of labor visibility and attribution. Survey respondents (n=142) reported that their work is more likely to be nonvisible or partially visible (i.e. visible to at most 1 other person) than fully visible (i.e. visible to 2 or more people). Furthermore, cognitively anchoring participants to the idea of high work visibility increased perceptions of labor visibility and decreased visibility importance compared to anchoring to low work visibility. This suggests that advertising OSS activities as "open" may not make labor visible to most people, but rather lead contributors to overestimate labor visibility. We therefore add to a growing body of evidence that designing systems that recognize all kinds of labor as legitimate contributions is likely to improve fairness in software development while providing greater transparency into work designs that help organizations and communities achieve their goals.Comment: 18 pages, 6 figure

Knowledge Sharing in Virtual Organisations: The Case of Open Source Software Communities

The knowledge-based economy, where everything and everybody is just one click away, has formed the foundation for a new organisational form. The term ‘virtual organisation’ (VO) reflects the emergence of a new organisational form with a record of success in the modern business environment, where knowledge has become a key component. Managing knowledge is the main driver in the knowledge-based economy. One of the best examples of such organisational forms with successful knowledge sharing processes is open source software (OSS) communities. This justifies my thesis, which undertakes primary research in OSS communities via qualitative and quantitative studies to find out how and to what extent knowledge is shared in those communities, in order to develop a Model for successful knowledge sharing processes in the VOs. The following factors in the Model, which influence the level of personal contribution in the OSS communities, were found. The level of personal contribution as an indicator to knowledge sharing for product innovation is a result of a combination of individual factors as well as individual opinion on the organisational factors. Factors such as an education level/explicit knowledge, incentives/benefits for the future and monetary reward do not play a role on their own, but they influence the level of roles and the level of activeness, which in turn influence the level of knowledge sharing, which is important for the level of personal contribution on product innovation. Personal and work related motivations are important factors to successful knowledge sharing inside OSS communities. However, most importantly, the level of personal contribution towards product innovation is a result of the satisfaction of individuals by the management of the OSS communities, identification with these communities and trust inside of these communities. The developed Model shows that organisational factors are more important than individual factors for successful knowledge sharing inside OSS communities from an individual’s perspective

Community detection with node attributes in multilayer networks

Community detection in networks is commonly performed using information about interactions between nodes. Recent advances have been made to incorporate multiple types of interactions, thus generalizing standard methods to multilayer networks. Often, though, one can access additional information regarding individual nodes, attributes, or covariates. A relevant question is thus how to properly incorporate this extra information in such frameworks. Here we develop a method that incorporates both the topology of interactions and node attributes to extract communities in multilayer networks. We propose a principled probabilistic method that does not assume any a priori correlation structure between attributes and communities but rather infers this from data. This leads to an efficient algorithmic implementation that exploits the sparsity of the dataset and can be used to perform several inference tasks; we provide an open-source implementation of the code online. We demonstrate our method on both synthetic and real-world data and compare performance with methods that do not use any attribute information. We find that including node information helps in predicting missing links or attributes. It also leads to more interpretable community structures and allows the quantification of the impact of the node attributes given in input

Promoting and Nurturing Interactions with Open Access Books: Strategies for Publishers and Authors (1.0).:A COPIM WP6 Research and Scoping Report

This report explores how publishers and authors can promote, nurture, and facilitate interaction with openly available books. Open access (obviously) opens up scholarship, but it also offers scope to enhance interactions between books, scholars, publishers, resources, librarians, and of course readers. This might take the form of creating communities and conversations around books, of gathering comments and hyperlinks, or of enabling updating, remixing and reusing, translating, modifying, reviewing, versioning, and forking of existing books. Open access, in short can create additional value and new avenues and formats that go beyond openness, by changing how people interact with books. Research shows that making books available in open access enhances discovery and online consultation (Snijder, 2019), but the short outline above makes clear that there is still a lot to be done to stimulate, explore, and practice the full range of book interactions made possible by open access. The first part of this report provides a literature overview that identifies the opportunities that digital technologies and enhanced interactions with open access books can provide for scholarship; it outlines some of the main types of interactions around scholarship—and around and as part of open access books more in particular—that scholars are involved in; and it showcases some of the experiments within humanities book publishing with reuse and remix; finally it presents some of the main (technological and socio-cultural) inhibitions that have prevented further uptake of these practices. The second part of this report more closely explores the technical dependencies that the introduced interactions and affordances rely upon. Doing so, it outlines and showcases various open source tools, software, technologies, platforms, infrastructures, guidelines and best practices, that lend themselves to being adopted by publishers and authors (or by publishers and authors working in collaboration with each other) to facilitate interaction around their book(s). The third part of this report then summarises the findings of the previous parts and provides recommendations, guidelines, and strategies (again, both socio-cultural and technological) for publishers and authors to further open up their books and collections to community interaction and reuse. Who is this Report for? The main communities we want to reach with this report are publishers and authors/scholars (or communities of scholars), to explore how they, by experimenting and often just making simple adjustments, can start to open up and stimulate interactions around their books. Where larger (commercial) publishers often have the resources to develop tools and workflows for interaction in-house (and often proprietary), scholar-led publishers, for example, although they have been at the vanguard of more experimental forms of publishing, have indicated that they often lack expertise and familiarity with more experimental forms of publishing and with the tools available to support them (Adema and Stone, 2017). We therefore focus in this report on open source tools and openly and freely available resources and guidelines that can help small-scale and not-for-profit book publishers that cannot afford to build their own custom platforms, to stimulate engagement around books. We also show various examples throughout this report of how publishers, publishing collectives and platforms, authors, and scholarly communities already are stimulating interaction around books in interesting ways and the tools and practices they have adopted to do so. This report focuses on interactions with books and on books within the humanities and social sciences in particular. Many of the types of interaction and interactive practices we describe within this report (such as for example open peer review and data mining), are being used and adopted more commonly within the STEM fields (where their uptake is also more widely researched). The humanities (and to a lesser extent the social sciences) in general have lower adoption rates where it concerns these types of practices and also have field specific preferences (as well as prejudices) towards many of these practices, which will be taken into account and further discussed in this report. Types of Interaction As part of our research we have identified several types of scholarly interaction taking place around books. The first part of this report is structured around some of the more common kinds of interaction that open access books afford: annotations, open peer review, remix and reuse, social scholarship and networked books, and emergent practices (including versioning, forking, and human computer interactions). This report doesn’t aim to cover all forms of interaction around books but has chosen to focus on the kinds of interactions that publishers and scholars would be able to promote and recreate with relatively simple adaptations to their workflows, systems, practices, and licensing. Each of the above identified types of interaction around books will be discussed in the next section, including how we can stimulate them and what obstacles currently exist towards their more general implementation. Throughout the next part of this report we will also be providing examples from within humanities book publishing to illustrate the different kinds of interaction. --- --- --- --- --- --- The report has itself been published in an experimental way. Making use of the advanced versioning functionalities offered by PubPub, we will iteratively update this document over the remainder of the project, thus allowing us to incorporate user feedback and new technological developments. Hence, we would be really grateful for constructive feedback from the communities out there who are already experimenting with new forms of interaction. Please don’t hesitate to leave comments either on the PubPub version (account and login required), or get in touch via email at [email protected] The report is published as a PDF here on Zenodo, while a more interactive book version that is available as a PubPub book.Community-led Open Publishing Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM) is supported by the Research England Development (RED) Fund, and Arcadia—a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin

A qualitative enquiry into OpenStreetMap making

Based on a case study on the OpenStreetMap community, this paper provides a contextual and embodied understanding of the user-led, user-participatory and user-generated produsage phenomenon. It employs Grounded Theory, Social Worlds Theory, and qualitative methods to illuminate and explores the produsage processes of OpenStreetMap making, and how knowledge artefacts such as maps can be collectively and collaboratively produced by a community of people, who are situated in different places around the world but engaged with the same repertoire of mapping practices. The empirical data illustrate that OpenStreetMap itself acts as a boundary object that enables actors from different social worlds to co-produce the Map through interacting with each other and negotiating the meanings of mapping, the mapping data and the Map itself. The discourses also show that unlike traditional maps that black-box cartographic knowledge and offer a single dominant perspective of cities or places, OpenStreetMap is an embodied epistemic object that embraces different world views. The paper also explores how contributors build their identities as an OpenStreetMaper alongside some other identities they have. Understanding the identity-building process helps to understand mapping as an embodied activity with emotional, cognitive and social repertoires

Creative freedom in the digital age

This thesis is particularly concerned with everyday creativity as a social practice that is taking place within the digital environment. Web 2.0 made it much easier for laypersons to produce and publish digital content and to participate in online communities. Through participation community members can acquire domain-relevant knowledge as well as develop their digital competency. In some areas, online communities of highly motivated amateurs (Pro-Ams) work to professional standards and even achieve better results than their professional colleagues. Open Source software projects or Wikis are among areas that rely on committed amateurs and the strength of a community. The empirical stage of the research comprises two studies that aim to investigate the role of ICT and the Internet in everyday creative activities and how the use of digital tools for creativity can be facilitated and improved. An exploratory online survey revealed that the majority of participants are involved in everyday creative activities many of which are performed with the use of digital tools. However, the lack of digital competency and skills has been proved to be among the main barriers to using software tools for everyday creativity and participation in the digital environment. Taking into account the survey data that revealed digital photo-editing and manipulation to be the most popular creative activity among participants, a powerful, free, image-editing program - the GIMP - was chosen for the experiment. A group of people with no professional knowledge of using image editing programs participated in a single-day workshop where they learned how to do basic image processing with a free software editor, the GIMP. Data collection methods involved questionnaires, observation and follow-up telephone interviews. The GIMP tutorial and practice session proved to be successful in engaging non-professionals in image manipulation with the GIMP and facilitating further use and learning through individual effort