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

Abstract

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.

The use of software tools and autonomous bots against vandalism: eroding Wikipedia’s moral order?

“…To answer this question I rely on a former analysis of mine of the management of trust within open-content communities (de Laat 2014; cf. also de Laat 2010de Laat , 2012b.…”

Evaluating the Role of Trust in Adoption: A Conceptual Replication in the Context of Open Source Systems

“…Organizations implementing open source software often rely on the contributions of anonymous individuals, or at least individuals from outside their own organization or control, which raises the issue of trust (De Laat, 2010). Consequently, a potential OSS user (in organizational settings, the IT decision maker) has to make an OSS adoption decision based on arguments from both OSS proponents and opponents.…”

“…Most of these studies face generalizability challenges since either they were focusing on a single (specific) OSS product in a particular organization/country (Goode, 2005) or their research setting was public administration (Federspiel & Brincker, 2010) and software companies (Hauge, Ayala, & Conradi, 2010). Interestingly, the majority of past studies focused on trust between OSS team members (De Laat, 2010;Von Krogh, Spaeth, & Lakhani, 2003) or investigated OSS trustworthiness (Del Bianco, Lavazza, Morasca, & Taibi, 2011). However, understanding the relationship between trust in the software itself and OSS adoption intention, particularly from the IT decision maker perspective, has received little attention.…”

Measuring Perceived Trust in Open Source Software Communities

“…Such trust is one of the fundamental traits of a successful collaborative development environment, e.g., OSS projects [3][4][5][6].…”

“…Therefore, assessing trust among the developers is a seminal question in OSS research. Recent study in [5] infer trust among developers based on their contributions. Others measured developers' contributions in Man-Month to investigate trust among them [7].…”