Folding and Unfolding: Balancing Openness and Transparency in Open Source Communities

Shaikh, Maha; Vaast, Emmanuelle

doi:10.1287/isre.2016.0646

Cited by 51 publications

(32 citation statements)

References 123 publications

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“…The self-organized quality of CoPs are what gives them meaning and importance and attempts to "overorganize" them are likely to weaken the knowledge flows that make them successful in the first place (Thompson 2005). As current studies point out, there are clear boundaries to what type and degree of interference are possible in OCs without disrupting the productive, spontaneous knowledge creation (see Shaikh and Vaast 2016).…”

Section: Toward a Research Agenda On Ocmentioning

confidence: 91%

Special Section Introduction—Online Community as Space for Knowledge Flows

Faraj

Krogh

Monteiro

et al. 2016

Information Systems Research

206

177

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O nline communities frequently create significant economic and relational value for community participants and beyond. It is widely accepted that the underlying source of such value is the collective flow of knowledge among community participants. We distinguish the conditions for flows of tacit and explicit knowledge in online communities and advance an unconventional theoretical conjecture: Online communities give rise to tacit knowledge flows between participants. The crucial condition for these flows is not the advent of novel, digital technology as often portrayed in the literature, but instead the technology's domestication by humanity and the sociality it affords. This conjecture holds profound implications for theory and research in the study of management and organization, as well as their relation to information technology.

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Section: Toward a Research Agenda On Ocmentioning

confidence: 91%

Special Section Introduction—Online Community as Space for Knowledge Flows

Faraj

Krogh

Monteiro

et al. 2016

Information Systems Research

206

177

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…An important reason to deploy community libraries is the lower control of the community owner over the infrastructure, because registration, contracts, and APIs are not required and libraries are not otherwise controlled. In addition, the ability of users to inspect the code and, if necessary, to copy and change it (Lee and Cole, 2003; Shaikh and Vaast, 2016; Zeitlyn, 2003) incentivizes companies that value experimentation to deploy these libraries. These companies have few resources at their disposal and, therefore, they seek to deploy software libraries to acquire functionality quickly and cheaply.…”

Section: Hypothesesmentioning

confidence: 99%

The ownership of digital infrastructure: Exploring the deployment of software libraries in a digital innovation cluster

Fink

Shao

Lichtenstein

et al. 2020

Journal of Information Technology

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Boundary resources have been shown to enable the arm’s-length relationships between platform owners and third-party developers that underlie digital innovation in platform ecosystems. While boundary resources that are owned by open-source communities and small-scale software vendors are also critical components in the digital infrastructure, their role in digital innovation has yet to be systematically explored. In particular, software libraries are popular boundary resources that provide functionality without the need for continued interaction with their owners. They are used extensively by commercial vendors to enable customization of their software products, by communities to disseminate open-source software, and by big-tech platform owners to provide functionality that does not involve control. This article reports on the deployment of such software libraries in the web and mobile (Android) contexts by 107 start-up companies in London. Our findings show that libraries owned by big-tech companies, product vendors, and communities coexist; that the deployment of big-tech libraries is unaffected by the scale of the deploying start-up; and that context evolution paths are consequential for library deployment. These findings portray a balanced picture of digital infrastructure as neither the community-based utopia of early open-source research nor the dystopia of the recent digital dominance literature.

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“…We follow Barrett et al's (2013, p. 217) invitation to draw on ideology/rhetorical framing of openness to "explore further these economic and political dimensions more explicitly in relation to the diffusion of technological innovations, and the discursive argumentations and justifications accompanying them". Drawing on Barrett et al (2013), Shaikh and Vaast (2016) Rhetorically, the authors hold, openness was heralded, whereas, pragmatically, open-source developers navigated their way through semi-closed arenas fluidly. Similarly, and more relevant to our case, the means of opening up data/knowing through 'platformization' is subject to rhetorical and ultimately political maneuvering (Ruppert 2015).…”

Section: Towards Synthetic Knowing: Political Perspectivesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Synthetic Knowing: The Politics of the Internet of Things

Monteiro

Parmiggiani

2019

MISQ

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Technology (NTNU) and adjunct professor at the University of Oslo. Drawing on an interdisciplinary perspective influenced by Science and Technology Studies, he is interested in the digital transformation in organizations of work and knowing, notably in healthcare and energy/oil. He has worked extensively with a theoretical lens of large-scale change projects informed by (information) infrastructure/digital platforms. His publications have appeared in MISQ, ISR, JAIS, Information and Organization, EJIS, The Information Society, Science, Technology & Human Values, and CSCW Journal.Elena Parmiggiani is postdoctoral researcher in Information Systems at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) and holds a PhD in Information Technology from NTNU (2015).She is interested in studying the sociotechnical challenges of implementing, integrating, and maintaining digital platforms and information infrastructures, and in the methodological stakes of studying distributed and long-term arrangements. Her work is based on an interdisciplinary lens influenced by Science and Technology Studies. Empirically, she has focused on environmental monitoring and the oil industry. She has published primarily within Information Systems and CSCW.Abstract. All knowing is material. The challenge for Information Systems (IS) research is to specify how knowing is material by drawing on theoretical characterizations of the digital.Synthetic knowing is knowing informed by theorizing digital materiality. We focus on two defining qualities: liquefaction (unhinging digital representations from physical objects, qualities, or processes) and open-endedness (extendable and generative). The Internet of Things (IoT) is crucial because sensors are vehicles of liquefaction. Their expanding scope for real-time 'seeing', 'hearing', 'tasting', 'smelling', and 'touching' increasingly mimics phenomenologically perceived reality. Empirically, we present a longitudinal case study of IoT-rendered marine environmental monitoring by an oil and gas company operating in the politically contested Arctic. We characterize synthetic knowing into four concepts, the former three tied to liquefaction and the latter to openendedness: (i) the objects of knowing are algorithmic phenomena; (ii) the sensors increasingly conjure up phenomenological reality; (iii) knowing is scoped (configurable); and (iv) open knowing/data is politically charged.perspectives and cites examples of modest (e.g., the possibility to mute the microphone during a video-conference) and moderate (e.g., creating an electronic archive that is available to all users regardless of geography) entanglement of materiality in the knowing. When, as in our case, the role of materiality in knowing is constitutive rather than modest or moderate, this need for a conceptual supplement to practice-based knowing is significantly compounded.

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Folding and Unfolding: Balancing Openness and Transparency in Open Source Communities

Cited by 51 publications

References 123 publications

Special Section Introduction—Online Community as Space for Knowledge Flows

Special Section Introduction—Online Community as Space for Knowledge Flows

The ownership of digital infrastructure: Exploring the deployment of software libraries in a digital innovation cluster

Synthetic Knowing: The Politics of the Internet of Things

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