Epistemic Communities, Situated Learning and Open Source Software Development

This paper analyses open source software development as an epistemic community. Open source software develpoment is a learning process where the involved parties contribute to, and learn from the community. It is discovered that theory of epistemic communities does indeed contribute to the understandig of open source software development. But the important learning process of open source development only explained by the introduction of situated learning and legitimate peripheral participation as a theoretical prerspective. This allows the learning process to be part of the activities in the epistemic community. The combination of situated learning and epistemic community is shown to be fruitful and capable of explaining some of the empirical observations. In particular the combination of theories can shed light on the motivational issues and group dynamics