Understanding knowledge sharing activities in free/open source software projects: An empirical study

Free/Open Source Software (F/OSS) projects are people-oriented and knowledge intensive software development environments. Many researchers focused on mailing lists to study coding activities of software developers. How expert software developers interact with each other and with non-developers in the use of community products have received little attention. This paper discusses the altruistic sharing of knowledge between knowledge providers and knowledge seekers in the Developer and User mailing lists of the Debian project. We analyze the posting and replying activities of the participants by counting the number of email messages they posted to the lists and the number of replies they made to questions others posted. We found out that participants interact and share their knowledge a lot, their positing activity is fairly highly correlated with their replying activity, the characteristics of posting and replying activities are different for different kinds of lists, and the knowledge sharing activity of self-organizing Free/Open Source communities could best be explained in terms of what we called “Fractal Cubic Distribution” rather than the power-law distribution mostly reported in the literature. The paper also proposes what could be researched in knowledge sharing activities in F/OSS projects mailing list and for what purpose. The research findings add to our understanding of knowledge sharing activities in F/OSS projects.     

Characteristics of Open Source Software Projects for the General Population: Reciprocity and Network Effects

In this paper, we conceptualize about, and empirically test for, differences between the more traditional Open Source Software (OSS) projects that are aimed towards techies-only and the projects that are aimed towards the general population. By drawing upon the theories of Reciprocity and Network Effects, we propose that OSS projects for techies-only are more likely to exhibit characteristics that are explained by balanced reciprocity, whereas OSS projects for the general population are more likely to show characteristics that are rooted in generalized reciprocity. In addition, we propose that local network effects can be used to explain certain characteristics of OSS projects for techies-only, whereas direct and indirect network effects shape the corresponding characteristics of OSS projects for the general population differently. The findings support our hypotheses and lead us to recommend actions for OSS projects targeted towards the general population, as well as suggestions for future research.     

Social presence and group attraction: exploring the effects of awareness systems in the home

This paper describes an experimental assessment of affective user benefits that may result from adding peripheral awareness information while remote friends share an activity in a home environment. The experiment has shown that providing awareness information increases the social presence and the group attraction felt by individuals towards remote partners.     

The development of group identity in computer and face-to-face groups with membership change

A three-part conception of group identity is proposed that draws on common fate, cohesiveness, and cognitive views of group identity. The changing contribution of these three components to group identity was examined for 31 original and 29 reconfigured groups which met for 7 consecutive weeks using either face-to-face (FIF) or computer-mediated communication (CMC). Group identity was consistently lower for computer-mediated groups, and this effect was stronger in the reconfigured groups. In the original groups, group identity started high and declined for both FTF and CMC groups. In the reconfigured groups, developmental patterns differed from those of the original groups, and also differed by communication medium. Individual differences accounted for a substantial amount of variance in group identity across original and reconfigured groups.     

Meetings of the Board: The Impact of Scheduling Medium on Long Term Group Coordination in Software Development

Despite a wealth of electronic group tools for coordinating the software development process, instead we find technologically adept groups preferring to use what seem to be outmoded material tools in critical projects. The current ethnographic study investigates this apparent paradox. We begin by building up a detailed picture of the overall software development process and identify critical general problems in achieving coordination. Coordination problems arise in software development not only because of the complex dependencies that hold among the work of different individuals, but also for social and motivational reasons. We identify the central role of the schedule as a coordination device, but find that its value can be undermined because the schedule is often neither accurate, current nor credible. As a result, the schedule is not used as a resource for individual or group planning. We then compare coordination in two development groups, one using electronic and the other material scheduling tools. We found that the medium of the schedule has a major impact on coordination problems. The size, public location and physical qualities of material tools engender certain crucial group processes that current electronic technologies fail to support. A large wallboard located in a public area encouraged greater responsibility, commitment and updating and its material properties served to encourage more reflective planning. As a result the wallboard schedule was both accurate and current. Furthermore, the public nature of the wallboard promoted group interaction around the board, it enabled collaborative problem solving, as well as informing individuals about the local and global progress of the project. Despite these benefits, however, the material tool fell short on several other dimensions such as distribution, complex dependency tracking, and versioning. We make design recommendations about how the benefits of material tools could be incorporated into electronic groupware systems and discuss the theoretical implications of this work.