Community, joining, and specialization in open source software innovation: a case study

“Users whose identity is known to the community enjoy greater benefits from revealing their innovations than do those who are less integrated (see also Wenger 1998, 2000; Taylor 1989; Calhoun 1988).”

“Empirical studies from open source software programming (Hertel et al. 2003, Lakhani and Wolf 2003, von Krogh et al. 2003) and simulator software (Henkel and Thies 2003) find a more mixed picture of motivations underlying innovative efforts, although they do not discard the explanatory importance…”

“Open communities can also subject innovative activity to informal governance rules, processes and rituals (O'Mahony and Ferraro 2007, von Krogh et al. 2003).”

“By rewarding merit with greater status, responsibility, or opportunities to enhance their own development (Stewart, 2005; von Krogh, Spaeth and Lakhani, 2003), production communities can satisfy a contributor's need for recognition and reward in ways that their work lives may not (e.g. Drucker,…”

“While commercial projects have employees paid and directed though formalized mechanisms, a critical step in becoming effective in an OSS project is to attract developers and motivate their input to the project (Mockus et al. 2002; Sturmer 2005; von Krogh et al. 2003).”

“Future research should also help us understand how to apply theory to other outcomes such as joining (Krogh et al. 2003), trust (Stewart and Gosain 2006), network evolution (Oh and Jeon 2007), and prevention of deviant behaviors (Friedman and Resnick 2001).”

“Although access to the code base may be controlled more restrictively (von Krogh, Spaeth, and Lakhani, 2003; O’Mahony and Ferraro, 2007), access to the source code and development communication is available to the public.”

“While some authors discuss the interrelationship between the motivation of OSS developers and contextual factors that impact on development, most of this work is recent and difficult to categorize (e.g., von Hippel and von Krogh, 2003; Shah, 2006).”

“Most importantly, it allows us to see how complex and nuanced socialization in an OSS project can be, extending earlier cross-sectional research (Von Krogh et al., 2003).”

“[17] found in their study of the contribution process in the Freenet open source project that there are "joining scripts" that successful newcomers follow before offering contributions.”

“These communities are composed of individuals who collaborate toward a common goal but do not share a common employer and are not governed by an employment hierarchy.”

“As noted above, the open source software development process involves an intensive peer-review mechanism, through which contributors receive feedback from peers in the project team, from software users, and from interested outsiders (von Krogh et al., 2003).”

“Thus a third pattern we observed was the formation of a “core-periphery” organizational structure (Koch and Schneider, 2002; von Krogh et al., 2003; Mockus et al., 2000; 2002).”

“The open source research community [6,8,9] has generally argued that people contribute to open sites for both altruistic and personal benefits.”

“The credible promise, or the release of workable software that is complete enough to work on, helps attract users and potential developers to a project (as described in von Krogh et al., 2003).”

“In addition, individual benefits in open source software projects have been tied to participation in communities surrounding the projects as opposed to simple free riding (Raymond, 1999; Moon and Sproull, 2000; Wayner, 2000; O’ Mahoney, 2003; von Krogh et al., 2003).”

“In these anonymous contexts, self-selection drives both participation and effort (Boudreau & Lakhani, 2009; von Krogh et al., 2003).”

“Peers in the project team, software users, and interested outsiders readily find faults in programming and often suggest specific changes to improve the performance of the code (von Krogh, Spaeth, and Lakhani 2003) .”

“These contributions should enhance our ability to develop more generalizable theories of cumulative innovation.”

“One of the main reasons cited for the failure of OSS projects is the lack of developers in the project teams, or the inability of the project to bring together a critical mass of developers (Lerner and Tirole 2001, O'Reilly 1999, von Krogh et al. 2003).”

“They usually arrive with a priori knowledge about coding that is needed in the community, gradually situate their knowledge within a specific problem/function domain that concerns the OSS community [63], and then contribute by developing solutions to the challenges at hand [55].”

“research in various contexts—including communities of practice [25], OSS communities [50, 52, 64, 94], distributed collaboration systems such as Wikipedia [6, 61, 99] consumer communities [60, 101]—points out that, in order to successfully manage these communities, one needs to understand the different roles that indi…”

“Second, open source software runs counter to many established theories of innovation (Schoonhoven , 2003 ). von Krogh and von Hippel (2003) noted that conventional theory incentives to innovate relate to the regime of intellectual property rights that offer innovators the possibility of…”

“Transparent work environments such as GitHub have developers using information made visible due to transparency to make inferences about projects and other developers when evaluating contributions [5, 13].”

“• Formal and informal rules about verifying developer identity (O’Mahony & Ferraro, forthcoming), assigning programming tasks to people (Crowston et al. 2005), according developer status to newcomers (von Krogh et al. 2003), and the peer review of code (Lee and Cole 2003).”

“As a result, OCs can be sites for participant engagement, not merely of the kind seen on the much heralded face-to-face communities of practice, but also offering extended knowledge production of a new kind (see von Krogh et al. 2003).”

“A way to examine decision-making in a community is to identify (1) how members gain code level access rights (e.g. Von Krogh et al. 2003); (2) how members gain decision-making rights (e.g. Heckman et al 2006); and (3) the degree to which project communications and activities are publicly available.”

“Such is the case of participation in libre (free, open source) software projects [8], where inequality has been the focus of many studies [9], [10].”

“…those projects are attracting skilled professional programmers, young students who join communities as social contexts in which to learn about computer software development, or other individuals who are seeking to 3 See, e.g., von Krogh et al. (2003) and the literature discussed below (Section 2).”

“From this literature, we identified three behaviors that could predict progression to a lateral authority role: the degree to which individuals engaged in (1) technical contributions, (2) technical communication, and (3) coordination work.”

“[25], for example, proposed a joining script for developers who want to take part in a project based on historical analysis.”

“[17, 39]).”

“…variation exists in the nature of contribution behaviors, with users differentiating themselves into diverse roles based on the kind of contributions they make (von Krogh et al. 2003, Butler et al. 2007, Preece and Shneiderman 2009, Smith and Kollock 2009, Kraut et al. 2011, Welser et al. 2007).”

“studied the factors that led newcomers to be succesfully accepted by the community of a freestanding open source project [16].”

“Yet, F/OSS is characterized as intensely people-oriented (Timothy et al., 2005) and knowledge intensive software development process (Krogh et al., 2003; Lanzara and Morner, 2003).”

“[84] von Krogh G, Spaeth S, Lakhani KR.”

“Ascension into the core group is a socio-technical process; earning commit-ter status involves socializing with the core group [23, 30, 64] and demonstrated commitment through repeated, high-qualitycontribu-tions [18, 70].”

“Exploring the field of open innovation.”

“Studies of various open source projects find that contributors claim that an important reason they participate is to build a reputation within the community (Lerner and Tirole 2002; Lakhani and von Hippel 2003; von Krogh et al. 2003; Lakhani and Wolf 2005).”

“…been applied to individuals who organize for collective outcomes outside the boundaries of any one organization (von Hippel and von Krogh, 2003 von Krogh et al., 2003; Lakhani and Wolf, 2005; Lakhani and von Hippel, 2003; O’Mahony and Ferraro, 2007) and, at the macro level, provided a critical…”

“Lessig (1999) identifies four elements that regulate behavior online: laws, norms, markets and technology (or code or architecture, as he called it).”

“A firm may sponsor contributors, but firms typically cannot become members.”

“A study of what motivates open source developers [von Krogh et al. 2003, p. 1231] identi.ed four key factors that would act as a contribution barrier if not in place.”

“Members of these communities bring their individual domain knowledge to bear on technical problems, share solutions, promote their work, and develop and improve on technology (Franke & Shah, 2003; von Krogh et al., 2003; Jeppesen & Molin, 2003).”

“We build upon existing work by Ducheneaut [9], von Krogh [21], and others to: develop a theory of FLOSS immigration, consid­ering three (con.icting) relevant factors that in­.uence if/when a FLOSS participant becomes a developer: technical commitment, which is di.”

“Open Source projects typically do not provide formal mentoring and training for newcomers and it is the responsibility of the newcomer to identify the appropriate technical tasks and start contributing [10, 29].”

“Free and open-source software (F/OSS) projects — such as KDE and Linux, for instance — have been portrayed as the most global and successful examples of user integration and online collaboration (Lee and Cole 2003; von Hippel and von Krogh 2003; von Krogh et al. 2003; von Krogh and von Hippel 2006).”

“However, not only does the founder have to prove that the project is worthy of support by others, but developers interested in joining a project often have to show that they possess the skills required by solving some of the technical issues the project is currently facing (von Krogh et al., 2003).”

“[78] studied the joining process of FreeNet project.”

“T O function, Free-Libre and/or open source software (FLOSS) projects need ongoing contributions from new and existing participants [1], [2].”

“Prior work suggests that a congruence of the newcomer’s social and technical activities is essential for successful onboarding in OSS [3, 4, 8, 10, 17, 40].”

“…such as altruism; extrinsic motivations, such as advertising one’s skills to potential employers; or functional explanations, such as solving an immediate technical problem (Lakhani and von Hippel 2003; Lerner and Tirole 2002, 2005; Roberts et al. 2006; Shah 2006; von Krogh et al. 2003).”