The Open Source Software Ecosystem

[first paragraph] Open source research in the late 1990s and early 2000\u27s described open source development projects as all-volunteer endeavors without the existence of monetary incentives (Chakravarty, Haruvy and Wu, 2007), and relatively recent empirical studies (Ghosh, 2005; Wolf {{243}}) confirm that a sizable percentage of open source developers are indeed volunteers.1 Open source development projects involving more than one developer were seen to follow a “hacker ethic” (Himanen, 2000; von Hippel and von Krogh, 2003) where individuals freely give away and exchange software they had written so that it could be modified and built upon, with an expectation of reciprocation. An early puzzle, of particular interest to economists, was why people would voluntarily contribute their ideas and time to these projects (Lerner and Tirole {{243}}. We\u27ll focus on these fine-scale behavioral questions in Chapter 3, and will explain that there are clear reasons – such as distance learning, signaling, enjoyment, and “user-driven innovation” based on a need (von Hippel, 2005) – that motivate these volunteers to participate

Brooks\u27 Versus Linus\u27 Law: An Empirical Test of Open Source Projects

Free/Libre and Open Source Software (FOSS) projects are Internet-based collaborations consisting of volunteers and paid professionals who come together to create computer software..

Open Source Software Collaboration: Foundational Concepts and an Empirical Analysis

This paper has three primary goals. First, we provide an overview on some foundational concepts – “peer-production,” “user-centric innovation,” “crowdsourcing,” “task granularity,” and yes, open source and open content – for they are key elements of Internet-based collaboration we see today. Second, through this discussion on foundational concepts, we hope to make it clear why people interested in collaborative public management and administration should care about open source and open source-like collaboration. After this argument is made, we provide a very condensed summary of where we are to date on open source collaboration research. The goal of that research is to learn about the factors that lead to successful or abandoned collaborations in the open source domain, in part to help us understand how “open source-like” collaborations can be deployed in areas outside of software. We have a lot to cover. Let’s get right to it

Volume Introduction Letter

This Conference Proceedings is a collection of outstanding papers and posters submitted to the Academic Program of the International Conference for Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial (FOSS4G), 14th to 19th August 2017 in Boston, U.S.A

Lights, Camera...Citizen Science: Assessing the Effectiveness of Smartphone-Based Video Training in Invasive Plant Indentification

The rapid growth and increasing popularity of smartphone technology is putting sophisticated data-collection tools in the hands of more and more citizens. This has exciting implications for the expanding field of citizen science. With smartphonebased applications (apps), it is now increasingly practical to remotely acquire high quality citizen-submitted data at a fraction of the cost of a traditional study. Yet, one impediment to citizen science projects is the question of how to train participants. The traditional ‘‘in-person’’ training model, while effective, can be cost prohibitive as the spatial scale of a project increases. To explore possible solutions, we analyze three training models: 1) in-person, 2) app-based video, and 3) app-based text/images in the context of invasive plant identification in Massachusetts. Encouragingly, we find that participants who received video training were as successful at invasive plant identification as those trained in-person, while those receiving just text/images were less successful. This finding has implications for a variety of citizen science projects that need alternative methods to effectively train participants when in-person training is impractical

Introduction to Geographic Information Systems for Natural Resources Management

A lab exercise manual used in an Introduction to Geographic Information Systems class designed for undergraduates or graduate students. Material takes students though the fundamentals using ArcGIS v10

Identifying Success and Abandonment of Free/Libre and Open Source (FLOSS) Commons: A Preliminary Classification of Sourceforge.net projects

Free/Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS) projects are a form of commons where individuals work collectively to produce software that is a public, rather than a private, good. The famous phrase “Tragedy of the Commons” describes a situation where a natural resource commons, such as a pasture, or a water supply, gets depleted because of overuse. The tragedy in FLOSS commons is distinctly different -- it occurs when collective action is abandoned before a software product is produced or reaches its full potential. This paper builds on previous work about defining success in FLOSS projects by taking a collective action perspective. We first report the results of interviews with FLOSS developers regarding our ideas about success and failure in FLOSS projects. Building on those interviews and previous work, we then describe our criteria for defining success or abandonment in FLOSS commons. Finally, we discuss the results and validation of a classification of nearly all projects hosted on Sourceforge.net as of August 2006