A Tool for Identifying Swarm Intelligence on a Free/Open Source Software Mailing List

A software tool designed using the concepts of swarm intelligence and text mining is proposed as an aid in the analysis of free/open source software (FOSS) development communities. A prototype of the tool collects textual data from an electronic mailing list, a primary mode of FOSS developer communication. The tool enables a user to compare patterns of discussion topics found in the text with patterns of swarm intelligence. The research of this design is congruent with Madey et al.‟s (2002) observation that the open source software development phenomenon shows an emergent behavior and can be modeled after agent-based, biologically-inspired swarms. The goal of a tool for identifying emergent intelligence on FOSS mailing lists is to increasing the user‟s understanding of a given FOSS development community

Reflection on Knowledge Sharing in F/OSS Projects

Abstract. Knowledge sharing between software project participants simplifies a range of decision-making processes and helps improve the way software is being developed, distributed, and supported. However, research in this area has traditionally been very difficult because the source of knowledge, the code, has been a guarded secret and software developers and users inhabit different worlds. F/OSS projects have changed the way we perceive and understand knowledge sharing in distributed software development. This short paper presents our current understanding, and what needs to be done in terms of empirical research in knowledge sharing in F/OSS projects

Integrating Data from Multiple Repositories to Analyze Patterns of Contribution in FOSS Projects

The majority of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) developers are mobile and often use different identities in the projects or communities they participate in. These characteristics not only poses challenges for researchers studying the presence (where) and contributions (how much) of developers across multiple repositories, but may also require special attention when formulating appropriate metrics or indicators for the certification of both the FOSS product and process. In this paper, we present a methodology to study the patterns of contribution of 502 developers in both SVN and mailing lists in 20 GNOME projects. Our findings shows that only a small percentage of developers are contributing to both repositories and this cohort are making more commits than they are posting messages to mailing lists. The implications of these findings for our understanding of the patterns of contribution in FOSS projects and on the quality of the final product are discussed

Managing the bazaar: commercialization and peripheral participation in mature, community-led free/open source software projects

The thesis investigates two fundamental dynamics of participation and collaboration in mature, community-led Free/Open Source (F/OS) software projects - commercialization and peripheral participation. The aim of the thesis is to examine whether the power relations that underlie the F/OS model of development are indicative of a new form of power relations supported by ICTs. Theoretically, the thesis is located within the Communities of Practice (CoP) literature and it draws upon Michel Foucault's ideas about the historical and relational character of power. It also mobilizes, to a lesser extent, Erving Goffman's notion of `face-work'. This framework supports a methodology that questions the rationality of how F/OS is organized and examines the relations between employed coders and volunteers, experienced and inexperienced coders, and programmers and nonprogrammers. The thesis examines discursive and structural dimensions of collaboration and employs quantitative and qualitative methods. Structural characteristics are considered in the light of arguments about embeddedness. The thesis contributes insights into how the gift economy is embedded in the exchange economy and the role of peripheral contributors. The analysis indicates that community-integrated paid developers have a key role in project development, maintaining the infrastructure aspects of the code base. The analysis suggests that programming and non-programming contributors are distinct in their make-up, priorities and rhythms of participation, and that learning plays an important role in controlling access. The results show that volunteers are important drivers of peripheral activities, such as translation and documentation. The term `autonomous peripherality' is used to capture the unique characteristics of these activities. These findings support the argument that centrality and peripherality are associated with the division of labour, which, in turn, is associated with employment relations and frameworks of institutional support. The thesis shows how the tensions produced by commercialization and peripheral participation are interwoven with values of meritocracy, ritual and strategic enactment of the idea of community as well as with tools and techniques developed to address the emergence of a set of problems specific to management and governance. These are characterized as `technologies of communities'. It is argued that the emerging topology of F/OS participation, seen as a `relational meshwork', is indicative of a redefinition of the relationship between sociality and economic production within mature, community-led F/OS projects

Corporatizing Open Source Software Innovation in the Plone Community

Increasingly open source (OS) software development is organized in a way similar to how a corporation would organize development. This paper examines this corporatizing effect by studying the relationship between peer-oriented social structures and goal-oriented technical structures in the Plone community. Social structures are said to exhibit assortative mixing, a like attract like characteristic whereas technical structures exhibits an opposite effect of disassortative mixing. Our first finding suggests that the patterns of collaborative contributions and interdependences among software modules exhibit the characteristic of disassortative mixing. Specifically, Plone developers were more likely to contribute to modules that already have a high concentration of contributions, which in turn lead to an increase in module reuse over time. This finding contributes to the debate of whether social systems are strictly assortative, and technological systems strictly disassortative (Newman, 2002). Our second contribution concerns the impact of corporatizing OSS projects, suggesting that corporatizing OS development had the effect of weakening the social organizing among developers, and shifted the patterns of contributions to adhere with the technical requirements

The meaning of sharing in free software and beyond

This study brings together findings about two contexts of sharing in order to explore the meaning of the word in the digital environment. First, this study is based on ethnographic research of free software projects and uses the resulting thick description to determine the meaning of sharing in this context. Second, the current literature on sharing usually takes user-generated content (UGC) platforms as its empirical reference, resulting in identifying a distinct meaning of sharing in this context. By combining the two sets of findings into a single narrative, this study makes three points: (1) the academic discourse on free software conceptualizing it as a form of gift-giving antithetical to the ways of capitalist production needs to be revised; (2) the use of sharing in the context of UGC platforms relies heavily on references to the culture of free software; (3) although representatives from both contexts claim to be taking part in the same sharing practices, there are substantial differences in the type of information being shared, the explicitness of the sharing mechanisms, and the organizational context of monetization of the shared objects

IT-Enabled Knowledge Creation for Open Innovation

Open innovation is increasingly important for researchers and practitioners alike. Open innovation is closely linked to knowledge creation in that, with open innovation, knowledge inflows and outflows are exploited for innovation. In the information systems field, open innovation has been closely linked to open source software development teams. However, the literature has not yet identified how open source software development teams use information technologies to create knowledge to bring about open innovation. This study fills in this gap by asking the following research questions: RQ1) How do innovative open source software development teams create knowledge?, and RQ2) What types of information technologies do innovative open source software development teams rely on for enabling knowledge creation? I answer these research questions with a revelatory case study. The findings contribute to the knowledge management theory by identifying how three of the four knowledge creation modes identified by Nonaka and Takeuchi (1995) manifest through different behaviors in the IT-enabled open innovation setting compared to behaviors observed in the organizational setting. The findings also contribute to information systems theory by identifying the role of information technologies in enabling knowledge creation for open innovation. This study further provides researchers and practitioners with ways of identifying knowledge creation by analyzing information technology artifacts, such as mailing lists, issue trackers, and software versioning tools

Balancing Requirements of Decision and Action

This article deals with decision-making processes about new development aims in Free/Open Source software (FOSS) projects. It focuses on the question how community driven projects manage to not only make decisions but also implement them successfully. Following the approach of Nils Brunsson, the requirements of (rational) decision-making and action are somewhat antagonistic: On the one hand, rationality of decision-making implies extensive evaluation of alternatives and arguments that can lead to an uncertainty as to which of the alternative will be chosen. On the other hand, a good basis for collective action is established when uncertainty is reduced and consistent expectations exist as to what kind of action will be performed. Corroborating on an empirical analysis of a decision-making process and interviews conducted with FOSS developers, three mechanisms of ending a discussion are identified. The paper concludes evaluating to what extent each of these mechanisms serves the requirements for decision-making and action

Balancing Requirements of Decision and Action: Decision-Making and Implementation in Free/Open Source Software Projects

Taubert NC. Balancing Requirements of Decision and Action: Decision-Making and Implementation in Free/Open Source Software Projects. Science, Technology & Innovation Studies. 2008;4(1):69-88