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

Eyeballs, Bugs, and Releases in Open Source Software

This study examines two widely cited principles of Linus’ law, namely “given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow”, and “release early and release often”. The aim is to understand their relationships and their limits to debugging open source software (OSS) bugs. Anecdotally, most of the successful OSS groups seldom develop in isolation; and their bugs and the underlying debugging processes are likely to be intertwined among multiple groups. We argue that the interrelatedness among software groups is an outcome of the long range contacts established through the boundary spanning activities of their contributors. Long-range contacts can exert an inverted U-shaped impact on releases, that is, initially, as conduits of valuable information, they benefit releases. But too many contacts slow down releases. We also hypothesized the influence of long-range contacts on releases is moderated by the relative location of OSS groups. We tested these intricate relationships using the contributions made by 7078 developers in solving over a million of highest priority bugs from 2343 software groups. Our empirical models are largely supported

Network Analysis of Disconnect in the Hollow State: The Case of eGovernment Service Portals

The use of network arrangement in the development and implementation of e-government service portals is on its increase. Yet, research on network arrangement in sourcing service portals still lags behind developments in practice. This paper uses a network analysis perspective to identify any disconnect in the network arrangement in the sourcing of e-government service portals. We analyzed the hyperlink information embedded within e-government service portals to map out the network cohesion between and among governmental agencies and third parties. The results of this study found that although government is harnessing both the private and social capital, private firms remain as the key providers whereas non-profit organizations tend to loose out in both technology and information sourcing

Market valuation of strategic responses to open source news and announcements

This paper examines the disruptive impact that open source (OS) software has on the mainstream software market within the period 2001 - 2003. The findings indicate that the stock market reacted negatively when the strategic responses of closed source incumbents were antagonistic to open source despite their relentless effort and investment in product and service enhancement. Whereas their counterparts that embraced open source were most likely to perform well on the stock market and successfully enter into the emerging new markets

Critical Success Factors for Formulating Service Delivery Strategies

Multi-channel service delivery is increasingly used in the interactions with citizens and businesses. Some projects have been undertaken successfully, whereas others failed and the reasons for success are not entirely clear. In this paper we focus on success factors for the development and implementation of multi-channel service delivery strategy. The factors are derived based on a document analysis and expanded and validated by public sector staff working in this field. In total 21 CSF were found and the top eight critical factors concern especially institutional and macro issues related to managing the interdependencies of strategic decisions, lobbying for strong political support and management buy-in, harnessing scarce resources, determining the right channel and services mix, enhancing inter-organizational integration and coordination, and managing clients’ perceptions. The findings should help to improve the development of service delivery strategies

Gender-Segregated Work in Saudi Arabia: A Structurational Perspective on Technology and Cultural Change

This paper aims to present a cultural analysis of collaborative technologies in the workplace. It examines gender-segregated work in Saudi-Arabia, and presents two contrasting cases of IT usage that act either to enable or constrain cultural change. Using Structuration Theory, the study exemplifies the dynamic and detailed analysis this lens can provide to cultural IS research. The study also examines Giddens’ theorising on the regionalisation of social interactions in time-space. By applying this in the IS context, the study attempts to provide a better understanding of the contextuality of electronically mediated communication

Diffusion of Open Access: Why are some disciplines more successful than others?

Since the first international statement on open access – the Budapest Open Access Initiative in February 2002, a growing number of open access publishing outlets have become available, and several policies in the European Union and the U.S. have been introduced to mandate the open access archiving of publicly funded research. In spite of these strides, research practices today are still far from completely embracing the open access movement. In this research in progress, we draw on models of the diffusion of changes in institutional practices across networks in order to understand how open source practices of unrestricted access to information and ideas have spread in the academic and research disciplines – in short, the diffusion of open access models of research dissemination across disciplines

Bucking the trend: An agentive perspective of managerial influence on blog’s attractiveness

Blog management is central to the digitalization of work. However, existing theories tend to focus on environmental influence rather than managerial control of a blog’s attractiveness at a microlevel. This study provides an agentive account of the adaptive behaviours exerted by the bloggers through the ways they use contents of their blogs to locate and harness their structural network positions of a blogosphere. We collated individual characteristics of 165 bloggers who blogged about economics, and then analysed the ways they maintained the contents of their blogs. We used network analysis and monomial logistic regression to test our model predictions. Our findings show that in contrast to less attractive blogs, bloggers who are mindful of their peers’ contents as a means of maintaining network positions attract a significantly higher level of traffic to their blogs. This agentive perspective offers practical insights into how nodal preferences can be reversed in blog management. We conclude the paper by discussing contributions to theory and future research