Seizing the Potentialities of Open Science: From a Community to a Platform Journal

The adventure of the Research Group on Collaborative Spaces (RGCS)[1] started in March 2014. At that time, our network was not an association. It was a Working Group settled in France, in the UK and in Canada gathering researchers and practitioners interested in topics of new collaborative work and collaborative spaces[2]. Quickly came on the way the issue of Open Science (OS) and Citizen Sciences. To develop knowledge commons (for society and organizations) and to explore impactful, inclusive, responsible, resonant new practices, methods and concepts about and for collaborative practices, OS appeared quickly as a promising spac

Implementation of weakly structured systems: moving from local practices to common organizational rules

The traditional implementation of an information system assumes that the IT system to be implemented is highly structured (HSS), carrying out regulatory functions expressed in organizational rules scripted into the system. Subsequent implementation seeks users’ compliance with stated regulatory needs. We propose an alternative view of implementing IT systems when such systems are weakly structured (WSS). In these systems, most scripted rules express the composition and behavior of digital objects, which organizational members tend to voluntarily enact as part of their tasks. By using analytical inference and illustrative examples, this work extends the Trifecta model of organizational regulation by developing a vocabulary and a process model for the evolution of the rule system during the implementation of WSS. The offered model depicts IT implementation as a movement from local practices, where system uses are discovered as affordances, to wider rule sets that regulate and enforce the shared deployment of such affordances

Cohomological tautness for Riemannian foliations

In this paper we present some new results on the tautness of Riemannian foliations in their historical context. The first part of the paper gives a short history of the problem. For a closed manifold, the tautness of a Riemannian foliation can be characterized cohomologically. We extend this cohomological characterization to a class of foliations which includes the foliated strata of any singular Riemannian foliation of a closed manifold

Tautness for riemannian foliations on non-compact manifolds

For a riemannian foliation $\mathcal{F}$ on a closed manifold $M$, it is known that $\mathcal{F}$ is taut (i.e. the leaves are minimal submanifolds) if and only if the (tautness) class defined by the mean curvature form $\kappa_\mu$ (relatively to a suitable riemannian metric $\mu$) is zero. In the transversally orientable case, tautness is equivalent to the non-vanishing of the top basic cohomology group $H^{^{n}}(M/\mathcal{F})$, where n = \codim \mathcal{F}. By the Poincar\'e Duality, this last condition is equivalent to the non-vanishing of the basic twisted cohomology group $H^{^{0}}_{_{\kappa_\mu}}(M/\mathcal{F})$, when $M$ is oriented. When $M$ is not compact, the tautness class is not even defined in general. In this work, we recover the previous study and results for a particular case of riemannian foliations on non compact manifolds: the regular part of a singular riemannian foliation on a compact manifold (CERF).Comment: 18 page

Opening up design science: The challenge of designing for reuse and joint development

The purpose of this paper is to advance design science by developing a framework for research on reuse and the relationship between external IT artifacts and their users. A design science approach to IS research needs to grapple with the fact that a number of relevant, economically attractive, external IT artifacts cannot be designed from scratch nor meaningfully evaluated based on the current state of development, and so design science research will struggle with incomplete cycles of design, relevance, and rigor. We suggest a strategic research agenda that integrates the design of the relationship between an external IT artifact and the user by considering the impact artifacts exert on users. Three dimensions derived from adaptive structuration theory inform our framework on three levels of design granularity (middle management, top management, and entrepreneur): agenda considers the dynamic properties of technological objects, adaptability refers to the functional affordance of external artifacts in development, and auspice captures the symbolic expression and scope for interpretation. We derive implications for research design

When decision support systems fail: insights for strategic information systems from Formula

Decision support systems (DSS) are sophisticated tools that increasingly take advantage of big data and are used to design and implement individual - and organization - level strategic decisions . Yet, when organizations excessively rely on their potential the outcome may be decision - making failure, particularly when such tools are applied under high pressure and turbulent conditions. Partial understanding and unidimensional interpretation can prevent learning from failure. Building on a practice perspective, we study an iconic case of strategic failure in Formula 1 racing. Our approach, which integrates the decision maker as well as the organizational and material context , identifies three interrelated sources of strategic failure that are worth investigation for decision - makers using DSS and big data: (1) t he situated nature and affordances of decision - making ; (2) t he distributed nature of cognition in decision - making; and (3) the performativity of the DSS. We outline specific research questions and their implications for firm performance and competitive advantage. Finally, we advance an agenda that can help close timely gaps in strategic IS research

The ownership of digital infrastructure: Exploring the deployment of software libraries in a digital innovation cluster

Boundary resources have been shown to enable the arm’s-length relationships between platform owners and third-party developers that underlie digital innovation in platform ecosystems. While boundary resources that are owned by open-source communities and smaller-scale software vendors are also critical components in the digital infrastructure, their role in digital innovation has yet to be systematically explored. In particular, software libraries are popular boundary resources that provide functionality without the need for continued interaction with their owners. They are used extensively by commercial vendors to enable customization of their software products, by communities to disseminate open-source software, and by big-tech platform owners to provide functionality that does not involve control. This paper reports on the deployment of such software libraries in the web and mobile (Android) contexts by 107 startup companies in London. Our findings show that libraries owned by big-tech companies, product vendors, and communities coexist; that the deployment of big-tech libraries is unaffected by the scale of the deploying startup; and that context evolution paths are consequential for library deployment. These findings portray a balanced picture of digital infrastructure as neither the community-based utopia of early open-source research nor the dystopia of the recent digital dominance literature

Code Reuse in Open Source Software

Code reuse is a form of knowledge reuse in software development that is fundamental to innovation in many fields. However, to date there has been no systematic investigation of code reuse in open source software projects. This study uses quantitative and qualitative data gathered from a sample of six open source software projects to explore two sets of research questions derived from the literature on software reuse in firms and open source software development. We find that code reuse is extensive across the sample and that open source software developers, much like developers in firms, apply tools that lower their search costs for knowledge and code, assess the quality of software components, and have incentives to reuse code. Open source software developers reuse code because they want to integrate functionality quickly, because they want to write preferred code, because they operate under limited resources in terms of time and skills, and because they can mitigate development costs through code reuse

Initiating private-collective innovation: The fragility of knowledge sharing

Incentives to innovate are a central element of innovation theory. In the private-investment model, innovators privately fund innovation and then use intellectual property protection mechanisms to appropriate returns from these investments. In the collective-action model, public subsidy funds public goods innovations, characterized by non-rivalry and non-exclusivity in using these innovations. Recently, these models have been compounded in the private-collective innovation model where innovators privately fund public goods innovations. Private-collective innovation is illustrated in the case of open source software development. This paper contributes to the work on this model by investigating incentives that motivate innovators to share their knowledge in an initial situation, before there is a community to support the innovation process. We use game theory to predict knowledge sharing behavior in private-collective innovation, and test these predictions in a laboratory setting. The results show that knowledge sharing is a coordination game with multiple equilibria, reflecting the fragility of knowledge sharing between innovators with conflicting interests. The experimental results demonstrate important asymmetries in the fragility of knowledge sharing and, in some situations, more knowledge sharing than theoretically predicted. A behavioral analysis suggests that knowledge sharing in private-collective innovation is not only affected by material incentives, but also by social preferences such as fairness. The results offer general insights into the relationship between incentives and knowledge sharing and contribute to a better understanding of the initiation of private-collective innovation