Documentation and access to knowledge in online communities: Know your audience and write appropriately?

Abstract

Virtual collaborations bring together people who must work together despite having varied access to and understanding of the work at hand. In many cases, the collaborations are technology supported, meaning that the work is done through shared documents. We develop a framework articulating the characteristics of documents supporting collaborators with access to asymmetric knowledge versus those with access to symmetric knowledge. Drawing on theories about document genre, boundary objects, and provenance, we hypothesize that documents supporting asymmetric collaborators are likely to articulate or prescribe their own (a) purpose, (b) context of use, (c) content and form, and (d) provenance in greater detail than documents supporting symmetric collaborators. We explore these hypotheses through content analysis of documents and instructions for documents from a variety of free/libre open‐source projects (FLOSS). We present findings consistent with the hypotheses developed as well as results extending beyond our theory‐derived assumptions. When participants have access to the same knowledge, the study suggests that prescriptions about the content of documents become less important compared with prescriptions about the context, provenance, and process of work. The study contributes with a dynamic perspective on communicative practices that consider an often‐uneven distribution of knowledge in virtual collaborations.

Deconstructing citizen science: a framework on communication and interaction using the concept of roles

“…Future research can use the presented framework as a starting point to further clarify communication and interaction, thus helping to inform explicit instructions so as to enable communication between actor groups who might not share the same knowledge background [Østerlund and Crowston, 2019].…”

A Review of Documentation: A Cross-Disciplinary Perspective

“…In another definition, document could be "any source of information, in material form, capable of being used for reference or study or as an authority; e.g., manuscripts, printed matter, illustrations, diagrams, museum specimens, etc...." [6]. Knowledge is retained and shared through documents of various forms [13]. A document relates to a wide range of items, including "structured and unstructured data, raw data, meta data or compiled data, images, numerical data, spreadsheets, charts, infographics, questionnaires, forms, transcripts, brochures, reports, videos, audio files and presentation slides, among many others" [14] (p. 179).…”

“…An awareness of the extent of technical terminologies across various disciplines has led to a range of approaches to documentation. "A novice programmer with no history in a particular project may get some sense of the work completed from a report written by a software engineer on the project" [13] (p. 619), but such a report is not necessarily useful for a seasoned IT professional or another person working in another field. In addition to the differences in their documentation needs, scholars and experts across various fields of study have their abbreviations, which may be the same but have discipline-specific meanings for those in their group.…”

“…Østerlund and Crowston [13] outlined three approaches to asymmetric or symmetric knowledge between groups or individuals, namely genre theory, the work on boundary objects, and studies of provenance. Genre focuses on the common knowledge that people bring to document production and use (symmetric knowledge).…”

VPNs as boundary objects of the internet: (mis)trust in the translation(s)

“…A sample of recent research utilising boundary objects that is of interest to internet researchers includes imagining news and technology nexus in terms of process, participation and curation (Lewis and Usher, 2016), digitisation and mixed document authorship (Huvila, 2019), Free-Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS) documentation (Østerlund and Crowston, 2019), humor online (Gal, 2018), and charting discourses of power legitimisation via competing images of the internet itself (Shepherd, 2018). What is perhaps missing from this sample is a distinction of and reflection on the extent these objects may be thought of as of the internet; as technical artefacts and infrastructures that are sung into existence through dis-tinct online cultures, practices and needs of internet use(rs), and software developers.…”