Learning by volunteer computing, thinking and gaming: What and how are volunteers learning by participating in Virtual Citizen Science?

Citizen Science (CS) refers to a form of research collaboration that engages volunteers without formal scientific training in contributing to empirical scientific projects. Virtual Citizen Science (VCS) projects engage participants in online tasks. VCS has demonstrated its usefulness for research, however little is known about its learning potential for volunteers. This paper reports on research exploring the learning outcomes and processes in VCS. In order to identify different kinds of learning, 32 exploratory interviews of volunteers were conducted in three different VCS projects. We found six main learning outcomes related to different participants' activities in the project. Volunteers learn on four dimensions that are directly related to the scope of the VCS project: they learn at the task/game level, acquire pattern recognition skills, on-topic content knowledge, and improve their scientific literacy. Thanks to indirect opportunities of VCS projects, volunteers learn on two additional dimensions: off topic knowledge and skills, and personal development. Activities through which volunteers learn can be categorized in two levels: at a micro (task/game) level that is direct participation to the task, and at a macro level, i.e. use of project documentation, personal research on the Internet, and practicing specific roles in project communities. Both types are influenced by interactions with others in chat or forums. Most learning happens to be informal, unstructured and social. Volunteers do not only learn from others by interacting with scientists and their peers, but also by working for others: they gain knowledge, new status and skills by acting as active participants, moderators, editors, translators, community managers, etc. in a project community. This research highlights these informal and social aspects in adult learning and science education and also stresses the importance for learning through the indirect opportunities provided by the project: the main one being the opportunity to participate and progress in a project community, according to one's tastes and skills

A social contract for virtual institutions

Computer-mediated social groups, often known as virtual communities, are now giving rise to a more durable and more abstract phenomenon: the emergence of virtual institutions. These social institutions operating mostly online exhibit very interesting qualities. Their distributed, collaborative, low-cost and reactive nature makes them very useful. Yet they are also probably more fragile than classical institutions and in need of appropriate support mechanisms. We will analyze them as social institutions, and then resort to social contract theory to determine adequate support measures. We will argue that virtual institutions can be greatly helped by making explicit and publicly available online their norms, rules and procedures, so as to improve the collaboration between their members

Understanding contributor behaviour within Free/Libre/Open Source Software communities: A socialization perspective

Attracting a large number of new contributors has been seen as a way to ensure the survival, long-term success, and sustainability of Free/Libre/Open Source Software (FLOSS) communities. However, this appears to be a necessary, but not a sufficient condition, as the well-being of FLOSS communities also relies on members performing behaviours that nurture and protect the community. Despite a large body of research on FLOSS communities, few studies have been undertaken to explore the influence of a participant’s socialization experience on their contribution behaviour. In addition, there has been relatively little research that has adopted a community-level view of FLOSS community participants’ contribution that goes beyond the mere notion of writing lines of code. The purpose of this study is to develop and rigorously test a socialization model that predicts contributor behaviour in the FLOSS community context. Drawing upon theories of socialization and citizenship behaviours from organizational behaviour research, this research develops and tests two separate but related research models. The first model proposes the direct impact of socialization factors on two performance-related dependent variables: task performance and community citizenship behaviours. The second model hypothesizes a mediating effect of two proximal socialization variables, social identification and social integration, between the socialization factors and the dependent variables. An exploratory study involving eleven FLOSS community leaders, managers, and experienced members was first conducted, to investigate the key variables that characterize FLOSS community newcomer socialization experience as well as the various instances of citizenship behaviours that are specific to the FLOSS community context. The analysis of the interview data revealed the existence of six socialization variables: task segregation, task purposefulness, interaction intensity, mentoring, joining structuredness, and supportiveness. Two sets of FLOSS community citizenship behaviours (CCB) were identified drawing on the citizenship behaviour literature. The first set, labelled CCB-I, comprised citizenship behaviours directed towards the benefit of individuals. The second set, CCB-P, included citizenship behaviours directed towards the benefit of the project. The findings were integrated in the two conceptual models. Subsequently, a research instrument was developed, following an extensive purification process that consisted of card sorting and expert review rounds, and a survey pretest. A pilot study assessed responses from 46 FLOSS contributors from two large FLOSS communities. Overall, the scales demonstrated high reliability and showed adequate construct validity. The analysis of the pilot study suggested the existence of a third CCB dimension, named CCB-C, that characterizes citizenship behaviours that are oriented towards the benefit of a project’s community. The main study was based on an online survey involving 327 respondents from twelve large FLOSS communities. Using Partial Least Squares (PLS), the collected data was used to test the two models. The results showed the overall superior predictive capability of the model hypothesizing the mediating effect of both social identification and social integration. Task performance was found to be directly predicted by task purposefulness as well as by interaction intensity and supportiveness through the mediation of social identification. Meanwhile, CCB was found to be impacted by the direct effect of task segregation and task purposefulness, and by interaction intensity and supportiveness through the mediation of both social identification and social integration. The existence of the third CCB dimension, CCB-C, was confirmed

Women's Professional Identity Formation in the Free/Open Source Software Community

We examine the formation of women’s professional identity in a particular type of male-dominated domain, the free and open source software development communities, and more broadly in information technology. Through an ethnographic analysis of interviews and online forums discussions, we find that women experience two types of discrepancies or gaps that constitute obstacles in the process of identity formation: an image gap and an identity gap. We show the strategies employed by women as they attempt to bridge these gaps; we also find that some of these strategies, while tackling one gap, may also deepen the other.Gender; Identity Formation; Self-presentation

Free/Libre/Open Source Software (Floss): Lessons for Intellectual Property Rights Management in a Knowledge-Based Economy

International audienceThe aim of this paper is to focus on the emerging situation in which open source software is nowadays produced not only by individual developers but in a growing proportion by firms that hire programmers for their own objectives of development in open source or for contributing to open source projects in the context of dedicated communities. As commercial firms it is important to analyze how and why they are capable of drawing benefits from such involvement and their connected activities. Moreover, we want to stress the different types of business model these firms rely on and the possible evolution they are likely to follow in the near future. We shown how Open Source principles provide an alternative way of thinking and managing intellectual property that do not come up against the same problems but needs a radical change in the way of drawing commercial benefits from knowledge development tasks. Then we analyze the growing involvement of commercial actors by setting up a typology of the different business models that can be observed in the OS landscape, how they correspond to the different strategies of industrial firms according to the main characteristics of their technical skills and market position. Finally, in a conclusive section we will draw the main lessons of the FLOSS experience for a possible enlargement of those principles of IPR management and business to other knowledge based commercial activities