Reusing or Reinventing The Wheel: The Search-Transfer Issue in Open Source Communities

Despite the raising awareness about the importance of open innovation communities in knowledge economies, empirical evidence about the structural determinants of knowledge reuse in these communities is lacking. In order to address this gap, the current study sets out to investigate the network-level determinants of knowledge reuse in open source projects. I suggest tracking code reuse across open source projects as a feasible and accessible proxy measure for knowledge reuse. I argue that in spite of favorable conditions, search and processing costs associated with knowledge reuse remain high enough to localize reuse behavior of open source developers. I hypothesize that network-level proximity of projects within the social network of open source community is a significant determinant of code reuse. A report on the progress of the empirical section of the research project along with some confirmatory preliminary results has been included

News devices : how digital objects participate in news work and research

News work is increasingly taking place in and through a variety of intersecting digital devices, from websites, to search engines, online platforms, apps, bots, web analytics, data analysis and visualisation tools. These devices are also increasingly used as resources in digital research, and their implications are yet to be fully understood. This thesis examines how digital objects participate in news work and research. To this end, I propose an orientation towards the news device as a research topic and approach. The news device approach calls attention to the ways in which practices and relations are co-produced with digital objects involved in news work. It also attends to how such digital devices may afford modes of studying these practices. To make the case for this approach, I examine the participation of three types of devices in three aspects of news work: (1) the role of the network graph in journalistic storytelling, (2) the role of the online platform in journalism coding, and (3) the role of the web tracker in news audience commodification. In all, the thesis contributes to understanding the digital transformations of news in two ways. First, it develops a rich, nuanced, multidisciplinary, collaborative and reflexive approach to news research with digital methods. Secondly, it provides novel insights into how digital devices shape both news processes and relations with the online advertising and marketing industries, commercial online platforms, digital visual culture, and other digital content producers

Knowledge Networks in the Mekong

Knowledge networks, then and now, global or local, are meant to manage knowledge. This report examines knowledge networks in Southeast Asia's Mekong region. Water Knowledge is intended as an informal research output focusing on current research discussions and debates around the waters and rivers of Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand, Vietnam and the Yunnan Province of China. Water Knowledge is not peer reviewed

Open science, communal culture, and women’s participation in the movement to improve science

Science is undergoing rapid change with the movement to improve science focused largely on reproducibility/replicability and open science practices. This moment of change—in which science turns inward to examine its methods and practices—provides an opportunity to address its historic lack of diversity and noninclusive culture. Through network modeling and semantic analysis, we provide an initial exploration of the structure, cultural frames, and women’s participation in the open science and reproducibility literatures (n = 2,926 articles and conference proceedings). Network analyses suggest that the open science and reproducibility literatures are emerging relatively independently of each other, sharing few common papers or authors. We next examine whether the literatures differentially incorporate collaborative, prosocial ideals that are known to engage members of underrepresented groups more than independent, winner-takes-all approaches. We find that open science has a more connected, collaborative structure than does reproducibility. Semantic analyses of paper abstracts reveal that these literatures have adopted different cultural frames: open science includes more explicitly communal and prosocial language than does reproducibility. Finally, consistent with literature suggesting the diversity benefits of communal and prosocial purposes, we find that women publish more frequently in high-status author positions (first or last) within open science (vs. reproducibility). Furthermore, this finding is further patterned by team size and time. Women are more represented in larger teams within reproducibility, and women’s participation is increasing in open science over time and decreasing in reproducibility. We conclude with actionable suggestions for cultivating a more prosocial and diverse culture of science

Good Issues and bad tidying: what GitHub can tell us about agency in project-based group modelling work for higher education

Collaborative project work in technology-enabled environments at university is essential for learners to become ready for an increasingly global, complex, and virtualised workplace. Research on effective pedagogical and technical design for computer supported collaborative learning in higher education (CSCL) has often taken place in synchronous contexts, using specialised technology platforms. However, large-scale changes to work and education resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic necessitate the development of pedagogical and research approaches that support students working asynchronously, in distributed teams, using collaboration platforms that extend beyond institutional infrastructure. Within the field of CSCL, knowledge building research has shown collaboration to be a complex systems phenomenon, involving the intersection of individual and collective efforts to actively advance the group’s shared knowledge, but studies analysing interaction data have been resource-intensive to conduct. Contemporary workplace platforms such as professional knowledge environments have multiple design affordances consistent with knowledge building principles, as well as the capacity to generate rich data about user activity. However, we have little understanding to date as to how these environments can support knowledge building pedagogies and facilitate associated research. This study uses a case study approach and thematic analysis to investigate the activity of three university groups engaged in a collaborative modelling task over time. It investigates how agency emerges during project work in professional knowledge environments, and how the system interaction data can extend our understanding of effective collaboration processes. The results show that the GitHub platform can support knowledge building pedagogical designs in facilitating individual and collective agency in higher education group work, and provide insights into epistemic, regulative and relational aspects of learner behaviour at individual and group levels. These findings extend our understanding of effective learning design to novel environments of a type likely to be used by our students in the workplace, and make design and methodological contributions to research on computer-supported collaborative learning