The Open Source Way of Working: a New Paradigm for the Division of Labour in Software Development?

The interest the Open Source Software Development Model has recently raised amongst social scientists has resulted in an accumulation of relevant research concerned with explaining and describing the motivations of Open Source developers and the advantages the Open Source methodology has over traditional proprietary software development models. However, existing literature has often examined the Open Source phenomenon from an excessively abstract and idealised perspective of the common interests of open source developers, therefore neglecting the very important organisational and institutional aspects of communities of individuals that may, in fact, have diverse interests and motivations. It is the aim of this paper to begin remedying this shortcoming by analysing the sources of authority in Open Source projects and the hierarchical structures according to which this authority is organised and distributed inside them. In order to do so, a theoretical framework based on empirical evidence extracted from a variety of projects is built, its main concerns being the description and explanation of recruitment, enculturation, promotion and conflict resolution dynamics present in Open Source projects. The paper argues that 'distributed authority' is a principal means employed by such communities to increase stability, diminish the severity and scope of conflicts over technical direction, and ease the problems of assessing the quality of contributions. The paper also argues that distributed authority is principally derived from interpersonal interaction and the construction of trust between individuals drawn to the project by diverse interests that are mediated and moderated through participants' common interest in the project's successful outcome. The paper presents several conclusions concerning the governance of open source communities and priorities for future research.open source software, hierarchies, trust, teams, co-operation.

Pengaruh Metode Pemicuan terhadap Perubahan Perilaku Buang Air Besar Sembarangan pada Masyarakat Kelurahan Kauman Kidul Kota Salatiga

The practice of open defecation is one of problems in sanitation and healthy hygienic behavior at Kelurahan Kauman Kidul\u27s community Salatiga. Recorded 79 families that still practice open defecation. Acces to latrines, which reached 68,78% compounded by floods that began often occurs after the construction of toll road aggravate the sanitary condition at Kelurahan Kauman Kidul. Permenkes No. 3 In 2014 about Community Based on Total Sanitation ( STBM ) is an approach to changing behavior hygienic and sanitary through community empowerment by means of triggering. The purpose of this research was to analyze the effect of triggering methods on the behavior of open defecation at Kauman Kidul\u27s community Salatiga. This research uses a pre-experimental design with one group pre-test post-test design. The population in this research is Kauman Kidul communities that still practice open defecation with a whole as samples based on inclusion and exclusion criteria. For analyzed is using univariate and bivariate by paired t test for normally distributed data and Wilcoxon test for abnormal distributed data with a significance level of 0.05. The results of the research showed that there was a significant differences in knowledge, attitudes and practices of the respondent about defecation behavior before and after the intervention method gets triggered with a p value less than 0.05. Therefore, this method is appropriate to proceed for areas where the population is still found practicing open defecation

Knowledge Generation and Dissemination in Virtual Communities and Virtual Teams

In recent years, the creation of Internet-based knowledge has become increasingly significant. However, with regard to the influence and control of knowledge management processes, knowledge communities indicate specific problems for creating and distributing information. People – constantly or temporarily – without Internet access are left out of this knowledge dissemination. The CCIRP project takes problems of this kind into account, creating concepts how information generation in knowledge communities (e.g. CC-Expert) or in virtual teams, and how this knowledge can be distributed based on traditional media. The paper describes two approaches (within the context of the project CCIRP) that deal with knowledge generation and dissemination. CC-Expert is a tool for virtual communities (open user group) and VITEA for virtual teams (closed user groups), which were realised at the university of Koblenz, Germany. The approach VITEA shows how the knowledge generation and dissemination in virtual teams can be improved. It offers an environment to disseminate knowledge to team members without Internet access or with temporarily no access or even where Internet access is more inconvenient than using other media. In the VITEA-System the technologies of a reference lab and a virtual community are combined. One focus are the common aspects and differences and another the methods of knowledge generation and how to distribute knowledge by using heterogeneous media

Designing Wise Communities that Engage in Creative Problem Solving: An Analysis of an Online Design Model

Addressing the conference theme of “design thinking,” this paper discusses an instructional design model, WisCom (Wisdom Communities) that we developed to build a wise learning community online, to solve open-ended, ill-structured problems such as solving a health crisis or an environmental disaster, which requires the exchange of multiple perspectives, inter-disciplinary thinking, creative problem solving, and social construction of knowledge. Based on socio-constructivist, sociocultural theories of learning and mediated cognition (Vygotsky, 1978), distributed cognition (Hutchins, 1995; Pea, 1993), group cognition (Stahl, 2006), research on how people learn (Bransford, Vye, Bateman, Brophy, & Roselli, 2004), and distance education design principles (Moore & Kearsley, 2011), WisCom specifies three components that must be designed to create a wise community online that engages in creative problem solving and transformational learning: (1) a cohesive learning community involved in negotiation of meaning and collaborative learning; (2) knowledge innovation – moving the learning community from data, information, and knowledge to wisdom, providing opportunities for reflection, sharing of perspectives, knowledge construction and preservation within the community, and (3) learner support and e-mentoring to achieve the communities’ learning goals

Exploring community smells in open-source:an automated approach

Software engineering is now more than ever a community effort. Its success often weighs on balancing distance, culture, global engineering practices and more. In this scenario many unforeseen socio-technical events may result into additional project cost or ?social" debt, e.g., sudden, collective employee turnover. With industrial research we discovered community smells, that is, sub-optimal patterns across the organisational and social structure in a software development community that are precursors of such nasty socio-technical events. To understand the impact of community smells at large, in this paper we first introduce CodeFace4Smells, an automated approach able to identify four community smell types that reflect socio-technical issues that have been shown to be detrimental both the software engineering and organisational research fields. Then, we perform a large-scale empirical study involving over 100 years worth of releases and communication structures data of 60 open-source communities: we evaluate (i) their diffuseness, i.e., how much are they distributed in open-source, (ii) how developers perceive them, to understand whether practitioners recognize their presence and their negative effects in practice, and (iii) how community smells relate to existing socio-technical factors, with the aim of assessing the inter-relations between them. The key findings of our study highlight that community smells are highly diffused in open-source and are perceived by developers as relevant problems for the evolution of software communities. Moreover, a number of state-of-the-art socio-technical indicators (e.g., socio-technical congruence) can be used to monitor how healthy a community is and possibly avoid the emergence of social debt.</p

Technology-In-Practice and its Influence on User Involvement in OSS 2.0 Projects

There is evidence of a lack of non-developer user involvement and usability problems with free and open source software. Open source software (OSS) 2.0 communities where developers are not the users of the software often have greater commercial and non-profit involvement in the project. As such these types of projects have a greater need to engage non-developer users and are likely to employ more rigorous project software development practices. The study of OSS 2.0 communities provides an opportunity to expand on our understanding of the structures that support involving non-developer users in distributed participatory design. Utilizing the structuralization perspective of technology as the main theoretical foundation, this poster presents initial results from a pilot study of one OSS 2.0 community discussing virtual mediation practices and their effect on users’ involvement with regard to knowledge transfer and influence over design outcomes.ye

Mechanism design for distributed task and resource allocation among self-interested agents in virtual organizations

The aggregate power of all resources on the Internet is enormous. The Internet can be viewed as a massive virtual organization that holds tremendous amounts of information and resources with different ownerships. However, little is known about how to run this organization efficiently. This dissertation studies the problems of distributed task and resource allocation among self-interested agents in virtual organizations. The developed solutions are not allocation mechanisms that can be imposed by a centralized designer, but decentralized interaction mechanisms that provide incentives to self-interested agents to behave cooperatively. These mechanisms also take computational tractability into consideration due to the inherent complexity of distributed task and resource allocation problems. Targeted allocation mechanisms can achieve global task allocation efficiency in a virtual organization and establish stable resource-sharing communities based on agentsâÃÂàown decisions about whether or not to behave cooperatively. This high level goal requires solving the following problems: synthetic task allocation, decentralized coalition formation and automated multiparty negotiation. For synthetic task allocation, in which each task needs to be accomplished by a virtual team composed of self-interested agents from different real organizations, my approach is to formalize the synthetic task allocation problem as an algorithmic mechanism design optimization problem. I have developed two approximation mechanisms that I prove are incentive compatible for a synthetic task allocation problem. This dissertation also develops a decentralized coalition formation mechanism, which is based on explicit negotiation among self-interested agents. Each agent makes its own decisions about whether or not to join a candidate coalition. The resulting coalitions are stable in the core in terms of coalition rationality. I have applied this mechanism to form resource sharing coalitions in computational grids and buyer coalitions in electronic markets. The developed negotiation mechanism in the decentralized coalition formation mechanism realizes automated multilateral negotiation among self-interested agents who have symmetric authority (i.e., no mediator exists and agents are peers). In combination, the decentralized allocation mechanisms presented in this dissertation lay a foundation for realizing automated resource management in open and scalable virtual organizations