Do Not Check in on Red

Holck, Jesper; Jørgensen, Niels

doi:10.4018/978-1-59140-369-2.ch001

Cited by 12 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 8 publications

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“…The decentralized task definition leads to a significant redundancy. Many producers carry out the same pending task simultaneously, and thus submit reports of or solutions to the same problem (Bonaccorsi & Rossi, 2003;Holck & Jørgensen, 2005). It is important to notice that this is a redundancy only insofar as many offered contributions are solutions to the same problem.…”

Section: Integration Of Contributionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…However, neither these investigations nor the generalized questions about transaction costs (Demil & Lecocq, 2003) or about the allocation of efforts to modules (Dalle, David, Ghosh, & Steinmueller, 2004) capture the specific ways in which an ill-defined group of people manages to produce a complex good. These ways have been looked at primarily in the context of management and software engineering analyses, which produced interesting case studies of the coordination of individual OSS projects such as Linux, Apache, Perl, Sendmail, Mozilla, and others (Holck & Jørgensen, 2005;Iannacci, 2003;Jørgensen, 2001;Koch & Schneider, 2002;Lanzara & Morner, 2003;Mockus, Fielding, & Herbsleb, 2002). Some analysts tried to compare OSS communities to "traditional organizations" (Sharma, Sugumeran, & Rajagopalan, 2002) or to catch the specific mode of OSS production with generalized concepts such as "virtual organization" (Gallivan, 2001) or "distributed collective practice" (Gasser & Ripoche, 2003).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The Social Order of Open Source Software Production

Gläser

2012

International Journal of Open Source Software and Processes

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This article contributes to the sociological understanding of open source software (OSS) production by identifying the social mechanism that creates social order in OSS communities. OSS communities are identified as production communities whose mode of production employs autonomous decentralized decision making on contributions and autonomous production of contributions while maintaining the necessary order by adjustment to the common subject matter of work. Thus, OSS communities belong to the same type of collective production system as scientific communities. Both consist of members who not only work on a common product, but are also aware of this collective work and adjust their actions accordingly. Membership is based on the self-perception of working with the community’s subject matter (software or respectively scientific knowledge). The major differences between the two are due to the different subject matters of work. Production communities are compared to the previously known collective production systems, namely, markets, organizations, and networks. They have a competitive advantage in the production under complete uncertainty, that is, when neither the nature of a problem, nor the way in which it can be solved, nor the skills required for its solution are known in advance.

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Section: Integration Of Contributionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Social Order of Open Source Software Production

Gläser

2012

International Journal of Open Source Software and Processes

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How can contributors to open-source communities be trusted? On the assumption, inference, and substitution of trust

Laat

2010

Ethics Inf Technol

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Open-source communities that focus on content rely squarely on the contributions of invisible strangers in cyberspace. How do such communities handle the problem of trusting that strangers have good intentions and adequate competence? This question is explored in relation to communities in which such trust is a vital issue: peer production of software (FreeBSD and Mozilla in particular) and encyclopaedia entries (Wikipedia in particular). In the context of open-source software, it is argued that trust was inferred from an underlying 'hacker ethic', which already existed. The Wikipedian project, by contrast, had to create an appropriate ethic along the way. In the interim, the assumption simply had to be that potential contributors were trustworthy; they were granted 'substantial trust'. Subsequently, projects from both communities introduced rules and regulations which partly substituted for the need to perceive contributors as trustworthy. They faced a design choice in the continuum between a high-discretion design (granting a large amount of trust to contributors) and a low-discretion design (leaving only a small amount of trust to contributors). It is found that open-source designs for software and encyclopaedias are likely to converge in the future towards a mid-level of discretion. In such a design the anonymous user is no longer invested with unquestioning trust.

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From open-source software to Wikipedia: ‘Backgrounding’ trust by collective monitoring and reputation tracking

Laat

2014

Ethics Inf Technol

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Open-content communities that focus on cocreation without requirements for entry have to face the issue of institutional trust in contributors. This research investigates the various ways in which these communities manage this issue. It is shown that communities of opensource software-continue to-rely mainly on hierarchy (reserving write-access for higher echelons), which substitutes (the need for) trust. Encyclopedic communities, though, largely avoid this solution. In the particular case of Wikipedia, which is confronted with persistent vandalism, another arrangement has been pioneered instead. Trust (i.e. full write-access) is 'backgrounded' by means of a permanent mobilization of Wikipedians to monitor incoming edits. Computational approaches have been developed for the purpose, yielding both sophisticated monitoring tools that are used by human patrollers, and bots that operate autonomously. Measures of reputation are also under investigation within Wikipedia; their incorporation in monitoring efforts, as an indicator of the trustworthiness of editors, is envisaged. These collective monitoring efforts are interpreted as focusing on avoiding possible damage being inflicted on Wikipedian spaces, thereby being allowed to keep the discretionary powers of editing intact for all users. Further, the essential differences between backgrounding and substituting trust are elaborated. Finally it is argued that the Wikipedian monitoring of new edits, especially by its heavy reliance on computational tools, raises a number of moral questions that need to be answered urgently.

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Do Not Check in on Red

Cited by 12 publications

References 8 publications

The Social Order of Open Source Software Production

The Social Order of Open Source Software Production

How can contributors to open-source communities be trusted? On the assumption, inference, and substitution of trust

From open-source software to Wikipedia: ‘Backgrounding’ trust by collective monitoring and reputation tracking

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