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

The Question of Inclusiveness: A think piece for the Making All Voices Count programme

This think piece draws from a desk review of experience in ICT-mediated citizen engagement, and an exchange of ideas in an e-dialogue between practitioners and scholars in late January 2014. The review takes in scholarly work and grey literature (including, in some cases, ideas expressed in blogs) on patterns of differential access to ICTs in developing countries, lessons emerging from the previous and latest generation of ICT mediated citizen engagement initiatives (such as e-government services and citizen reporting projects) and insights from non-tech-based accountability and transparency interventions.DFID, USAID, SIDA, Omidyar Networ

Reimagining Participation: Opportunities and Challenges of the Open Source Model of Collaboration for Development Thinking and Practice

Science and technology have a controversial record in alleviating poverty, especially in the context of developing countries. The technology push model – the idea that technological solutions can be transferred without problems across different contexts – has received much criticism within the development community. However, the latest wave of innovations, especially in the area of information and communication technologies (ICTs), seems to mark a sharp break with the past, promising increased access to information and opportunities for South?led innovations

Shifting the spotlight: understanding crowdsourcing intermediaries in transparency and accountability initiatives

This report highlights the ideas and practices that underlie the work of crowdsourcing intermediaries: actors who collect and analyse citizen feedback using digital platforms, and use it to support positive change. Most studies of crowdsourcing initiatives in the transparency and accountability field are primarily concerned with representation (whose voice is being heard?) and impact (what kind of change is being supported?). By contrast, this study shifts the spotlight onto crowdsourcing intermediaries themselves, their motives,and their theories of change and action. Key themes covered in the paper are: the role of crowdsourcing intermediaries as gatekeepers of citizen-generated data; the accountability of crowdsourcing intermediaries to citizens who contribute data, especially in terms of data policies; and the factors that influence the pathways of individual crowdsourcing intermediaries.DFIDUSAIDSIDAOmidyar Networ

Real Time Monitoring and the New Information Technologies

Debates as to the potential role of new Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) in monitoring the wellbeing of vulnerable groups is often bedevilled by the failure of two principal actors – social researchers and technical experts – to address the other's concerns or even to use language that is comprehensible to the other side. The aim here is to unpick some of the technical language relevant in this context and provide a brief introductory guide to some aspects of the current, rapidly changing and highly diverse ICT environment

ICTs and the Challenge of Health System Transition in Low and Middle-Income Countries

The aim of this paper is to contribute to debates about how governments and other stakeholders can influence the application of ICTs to increase access to safe, effective and affordable treatment of common illnesses, especially by the poor. First, it argues that the health sector is best conceptualized as a ‘knowledge economy’. This supports a broadened view of health service provision that includes formal and informal arrangements for the provision of medical advice and drugs. This is particularly important in countries with a pluralistic health system, with relatively underdeveloped institutional arrangements. It then argues that reframing the health sector as a knowledge economy allows us to circumvent the blind spots associated with donor-driven ICT-interventions and consider more broadly the forces that are driving e-health innovations. It draws on small case studies in Bangladesh and China to illustrate new types of organization and new kinds of relationship between organizations that are emerging. It argues that several factors have impeded the rapid diffusion of ICT innovations at scale including: the limited capacity of innovations to meet health service needs, the time it takes to build new kinds of partnership between public and private actors and participants in the health and communications sectors and the lack of a supportive regulatory environment. It emphasises the need to understand the political economy of the digital health knowledge economy and the new regulatory challenges likely to emerge. It concludes that governments will need to play a more active role to facilitate the diffusion of beneficial ICT innovations at scale and ensure that the overall pattern of health system development meets the needs of the population, including the poor

Learning and the imperative of production in Free/Open Source development

Abstract. This paper examines the role of learning in structuring access and participation in F/OS communities. In particular it highlights the challenges and barriers to access faced by new developers and the expectations of senior developers regarding the mindsets and capabilities of new contributors. It is argued that learning in F/OS is inextricably connected with the demand for continuous production. The evidence presented is drawn from interviews conducted with inexperienced and experienced contributors from the GNOME and KDE projects. The author challenges the view of learning as an enculturation process and the paper contributes to the understanding of power relations among established and peripheral members in communities of practice. Learning forms an integral part of the experience of participation in F/OS projects and underlies many aspects of collaboration. Given their limited resources, F/OS communities make significant efforts to lower the barriers to entry for new developers. Nevertheless, new developers face a number of difficulties which are associated with different aspects of development and participation. The paper draws on doctoral research [1] to highlight the challenges inherent in the learning process in F/OS communities from the perspective of new and senior developers. Theoretically, the paper contributes to a better understanding of power relations in communities of practice. Background to the study This section situates the argument within the context of existing contributions related to learning in F/OS communities and outlines the theoretical and methodological framework for the study Learning features as one of the main motives for participation in F/OS, and learning practices and processes, such as peer-review, are also often regarded as constitutive elements of the F/OS development model. Studies related to learning in F/OS fall into two broad groups. The first consists of studies that examine the role of tools and the technical characteristics of projects in the learning process. The second group includes studies that focus primarily on issues of socialization and joining. Examples from the first group include Shaikh and Cornford's [2] examination of Version Control or Concurrent Version Tools (VCT or CVS) and Baldwin and Clark's [3] examination of the role of code architecture in organizing and invitin

Political economy, the internet and FL/OSS development

Despite the growing amount of research on free/open source (F/OS) software development, there is little insight into how structural factors associated with institutions influence the patterns of software developer activity in this area. This chapter examines some of the dynamics of the development of this type of software and the extent to which these dynamics are associated with features of the gift economy as is frequently suggested in the literature. Drawing on an empirical analysis of contributors to the GNOME F/OS project, we suggest that greater attention should be given to the emergence of a mixed economy in which features of the exchange economy come to the fore with implications for the power relationships among those contributing to F/OS

Reimagining Participation: Opportunities and Challenges of the Open Source Model of Collaboration for Development Thinking and Practice

Science and technology have a controversial record in alleviating poverty, especially in the context of developing countries. The technology push model – the idea that technological solutions can be transferred without problems across different contexts – has received much criticism within the development community. However, the latest wave of innovations, especially in the area of information and communication technologies (ICTs), seems to mark a sharp break with the past, promising increased access to information and opportunities for South?led innovations