Stephanie Freeman Governing hybrid open source freeman

Governing Hybrid Open Source Community

Stephanie Freeman, PhD Post doc Researcher, INUSE (h:p://inuse.fi) Department of Management and InternaDonal Business Aalto University [email protected]

•  How is the structure and membership

constella;on of the community, specifically the rela;on between developers and users linguis;cally constructed in hybrid open development?

•  What characterizes Internet-‐mediated

“virtual” communi;es and how can they be defined? How do they differ from hierarchical forms of knowledge produc;on on one hand and from tradi;onal volunteer communi;es on the other?

Mailing list discussion, personal interviews, web page wri;ngs, email exchanges, field notes and other historical documents Four case studies inside one:

OpenOffice.org Groupware project OpenOffice.org Lingucomponent project Four Finnish public sector user organiza;ons The OpenOffice.org website

Freeman, S. 2011. Construc6ng a Community: Myths and Reali6es of the Open Development Model

Theore;cal sensi;zing concepts

•  Collabora6ve community (Adler, 2006; 2007; 2007; see also Adler & Hecksher, 2008; Adler, Kwon & Hecksher, 2008):

•  Communi6es of prac6ce (Lave & Wenger, 1991; Holland & Lave, 2009; Wenger,

1998) •  Community as objet-‐oriented ac6vity (Engeström, 1987) •  Imagined community (Anderson, 1983; cf. Cohen, 1985; Delanty, 2010; Maffesoli,

1996)

Intermediary concepts used for developing a discursive-‐rhetorical approach

1.  Cultural and discursive psychology (e.g. Billig Condor, Edwards, Gane, Middleton & Radley 1988; Harré, 1998; Mulhauser & Harré, 1990; Shofer,1993),

2.  cri;cal discourse analysis (e.g. Fairclough, 1992; see also van Dijk, 1993)

3.  social psychology, specifically the work by Henri Tajfel (1981; 1982) on social categories (cf. Sacks, 1992), and

4.  poli;cal science, specifically the work by Quen;n Skinner (2006) on changing poli;cal rhetoric.

ConcIusions I From hacker ethic and bazaar governance to more professionally and strategically regulated community

•  Empirical chapter 1. Open code and open dialogue cons;tu;ve to the success of volunteer-‐ firm-‐collabora;on -‐> also “openness” has boundaries

•  Empirical chapter 2. Volunteers’ changing paferns of mo;va;ons : “independent

entrepreneurs” with mobile membership in search of collabora;ve community – dis;nc;on between work and hobby blurred and changing -‐> the concept of “volunteer” ques;onable

•  Empirical chapter 3. User freedom or user control? IT staff as the “obligatory passage point”

in the dissemina;on of open source to end-‐user organiza;ons -‐> also open source can be used for control purposes

•  Empirical chapter 4. “Community” -‐ a powerful word and strategic tool for orien;ng towards mul;ple real and imagined audiences -‐> open source communi;es are managed through the prac;ce of authoring

ConcIusions II New developer & user categories in OSS -‐ new innova;on intermediaries

From user-‐developers and the core-‐periphery dis;nc;on to : 1) idea-‐genera;ng users 2) independent plug-‐in and extension tool providers 3) typical (end) users 4) ideological researcher-‐users 5) media;ng IT staff 6) media;ng management •  open development not collabora;ve from the start! •  return to the developer-‐user paradox…? •  Lead-‐users?

Methodological and theore;cal contribu;on

•  Discursive-‐ac;on community as a specific type of online engagement

•  Community authorship as a way of highligh;ng power rela;ons in communi;es

•  Runaway community characteris;c of online open source development

Stephanie Freeman Governing hybrid open source freeman

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