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

Social and interactional practices for disseminating current awareness information in an organisational setting.

Current awareness services are designed to keep users informed about recent developments based around user need profiles. In organisational settings, they may operate through both electronic and social interactions aimed at delivering information that is relevant, pertinent and current. Understanding these interactions can reveal the tensions in current awareness dissemination and help inform ways of making services more effective and efficient. We report an in-depth, observational study of electronic current awareness use within a large London law firm. The study found that selection, re-aggregation and forwarding of information by multiple actors gives rise to a complex sociotechnical distribution network. Knowledge management staff act as a layer of “intelligent filters” sensitive to complex, local information needs; their distribution decisions address multiple situational relevance factors in a situation fraught with information overload and restrictive time-pressures. Their decisions aim to optimise conflicting constraints of recall, precision and information quantity. Critical to this is the use of dynamic profile updates which propagate back through the network through formal and informal social interactions. This supports changes to situational relevance judgements and so allows the network to ‘self-tune’. These findings lead to design requirements, including that systems should support rapid assessment of information items against an individual’s interests; that it should be possible to organise information for different subsequent uses; and that there should be back-propagation from information consumers to providers, to tune the understanding of their information needs

The role of social media in relation to knowledge transfer and professional development

Introduction: Professional development is an important aspect of working practices for academic librarians. In the past decades the academic library has been subjected to an enormous range of technological and cultural advancements that have constantly required its staff to develop their professional knowledge and understanding. One of the most recent revolutions has been the advent of social media. This advent of a new technology can provide challenges and opportunities but to fully understand these we need to analyse the relationship between social media and various context in more depth. Method: This inductive grounded theory study was iteratively conducted in three different academic libraries in England. At each location an analysis of the social media in use both organisationally and individually was made, and a purposefully selected number of actors was interviewed to gain a deeper understanding of their ideas about social media, CPD and the potential to learn from social media. Findings: The findings demonstrate that the managerial view of CPD is not necessarily compatible with the perception, or needs, of practitioners in relation to their professional development. To increase understanding of this domain, the study analysed the underlying factors related to both social media use and perception, and participation in and perception of professional development. This has led to the discovery of a theory that can be summarised as Continuous Professional Adaptation is learning that occurs as a consequence of professional awareness and preparedness through the use of informal networks. Outcome: The grounded theory presented in this document demonstrates a need to expand the dialogue on professional development in academic libraries, in both an academic and practical context, based on the advent of social media. Formal development in the shape of Continuing Professional Development (CPD) is still regarded as the most relevant method of developing human resources due to the prevalence of a managerial approach to professional development. Conclusion: Increasingly academics and practitioners require more than the formal approach to professional development which can be classed as increasingly being irrelevant due to practical limitations of delivery time and mode and speed of changes occurring. This research contributes to that dialogue, providing a unique approach by incorporating social media with professional development

git2net - Mining Time-Stamped Co-Editing Networks from Large git Repositories

Data from software repositories have become an important foundation for the empirical study of software engineering processes. A recurring theme in the repository mining literature is the inference of developer networks capturing e.g. collaboration, coordination, or communication from the commit history of projects. Most of the studied networks are based on the co-authorship of software artefacts defined at the level of files, modules, or packages. While this approach has led to insights into the social aspects of software development, it neglects detailed information on code changes and code ownership, e.g. which exact lines of code have been authored by which developers, that is contained in the commit log of software projects. Addressing this issue, we introduce git2net, a scalable python software that facilitates the extraction of fine-grained co-editing networks in large git repositories. It uses text mining techniques to analyse the detailed history of textual modifications within files. This information allows us to construct directed, weighted, and time-stamped networks, where a link signifies that one developer has edited a block of source code originally written by another developer. Our tool is applied in case studies of an Open Source and a commercial software project. We argue that it opens up a massive new source of high-resolution data on human collaboration patterns.Comment: MSR 2019, 12 pages, 10 figure

Collaborative yet independent: Information practices in the physical sciences

In many ways, the physical sciences are at the forefront of using digital tools and methods to work with information and data. However, the fields and disciplines that make up the physical sciences are by no means uniform, and physical scientists find, use, and disseminate information in a variety of ways. This report examines information practices in the physical sciences across seven cases, and demonstrates the richly varied ways in which physical scientists work, collaborate, and share information and data. This report details seven case studies in the physical sciences. For each case, qualitative interviews and focus groups were used to understand the domain. Quantitative data gathered from a survey of participants highlights different information strategies employed across the cases, and identifies important software used for research. Finally, conclusions from across the cases are drawn, and recommendations are made. This report is the third in a series commissioned by the Research Information Network (RIN), each looking at information practices in a specific domain (life sciences, humanities, and physical sciences). The aim is to understand how researchers within a range of disciplines find and use information, and in particular how that has changed with the introduction of new technologies

Dependability Issues in Open Source Software - DIRC Project Activity 5 Final Report

This report presents the findings of this investigation by reporting on the main activities that have been undertaken and presenting our informed final recommendation on a follow-on project activity. It is structured in the following way. Section 2 explains the obstacles encountered while trying to understand the term "open source", contacts pursued and projects observed with respect to open source. Section 3 presents insights into the sociology of open source software development, whereas section 4 describes observations drawn and main issues identified for open source software development and dependable systems engineering. Finally, section 5 explains our recommendation together with the reasons behind our decision. Further insights on the activities described in this report, as well as various papers that have been written in relation to this activity can be found in the appendices A - E

A biography of open source software: community participation and individuation of open source code in the context of microfinance NGOs in North Africa and the Middle East

For many, microfinance is about building inclusive financial systems to help the poor gain direct access to financial services. Hundreds of grassroots have specialised in the provision of microfinance services worldwide. Most of them are adhoc organisations, which suffer severe organisational and informational deficiencies. Over the past decades, policy makers and consortia of microfinance experts have attempted to improve their capacity building through ICTs. In particular, there is strong emphasis on open source software (OSS) initiatives, as it is commonly believed that MFIs are uniquely positioned to benefit from the advantages of openness and free access. Furthermore, OSS approaches have recently become extremely popular. The OSS gurus are convinced there is a business case for a purely open source approach, especially across international development spheres. Nonetheless, getting people to agree on what is meant by OSS remains hard to achieve. On the one hand scholarly software research shows a lack of consensus and documents stories in which the OSS meaning is negotiated locally. On the other, the growing literature on ICT-for-international development does not provide answers as research, especially in the microfinance context, presents little empirical scrutiny. This thesis therefore critically explores the OSS in the microfinance context in order to understand itslong-term development and what might be some of the implications for MFIs. Theoretically I draw on the 3rd wave of research within the field of Science and Technology Studies –studies of Expertise and Experience (SEE). I couple the software ‘biography’ approach (Pollock and Williams 2009) with concepts from Simondon’s thesis on the individuation of technical beings (1958) as an integrated framework. I also design a single case study, which is supported by an extensive and longitudinal collection of data and a three-stage approach, including the analysis of sociograms, and email content. This case provides a rich empirical setting that challenges the current understanding of the ontology of software and goes beyond the instrumental views of design, building a comprehensive framework for community participation and software sustainability in the context of the microfinance global industry