Open Source Software Development Community

Definition

West and O’Mahony:

“One type of technical community that has received a great deal of empirical attention is an open source software development community. These communities are composed of individuals who collaborate toward a common goal but do not share a common employer and are not governed by an employment hierarchy. By using both online and offline means, open source software communities collectively produce software that is freely and publicly available – creating in effect a shared public good that can be used for either public or private purposes.” (http://www.joelwest.org/Papers/WestOMahony2008-WP.pdf)

Typology of Community vs. Corporate Relationships

The following excerpts makes the following distinctions:

- recognizing firms directly as participants or indirectly through employees - informal vs. formal social structures to manage membership - individually vs. collectively founded (organic vs. synthetic) - autonomous vs. sponsored

Introduction

West and O’Mahony:

“ Some communities explicitly recognize firms as participants, while in other cases firms participate indirectly through employees (i.e., sponsored contributors) that represent the firm’s interests (Dahlander and Wallin, 2006).

Often, an open source community will create an informal or formal social structure to manage membership and joining (von Krogh, Spaeth and Lakhani, 2003; O’Mahony and Ferraro 2007), but little has been done to understand how these projects are governed (see Shah, 2006; Markus, 2007; O’Mahony, 2007 for recent exploratory exceptions).

In addition to collaborating with autonomous open source communities, a growing number of corporate and government sponsors have founded their own open source communities to meet either public or private objectives. “ (http://www.joelwest.org/Papers/WestOMahony2008-WP.pdf)

Organic vs. Synthetic

West and O’Mahony:

West and O’Mahony (2005) distinguished between individually-founded and organizationally-founded open source communities, designating the former as “organic” and the latter as “synthetic”. These distinctions emphasized the different character of these two types of community founders and their prospective growth strategies. While organic projects are founded by individuals and grow through grass roots communications, synthetic communities are founded by corporations and grow with more strategic direction.

Since communities can evolve along different trajectories after their founding, in this paper, we refer to autonomous and sponsored communities to focus on their current governance structure (cf. Markus, 2007; O’Mahony, 2007) as opposed to their founding state. For example, a synthetic community could begin as a sponsored community, but evolve to become fully autonomous – as was the case with Netscape’s release of Mozilla and its subsequent transition to independence. By using the categories of autonomous and sponsored, our aim is to provide a more precise categorization to help scholars examine open source communities over their lifecycle.” (http://www.joelwest.org/Papers/WestOMahony2008-WP.pdf)

Autonomous vs. Sponsored

West and O’Mahony:

“We define an autonomous open source community as one that is presently independent of any one firm and community managed (cf. O’Mahony, 2007). A community-managed governance system operates outside the reach of authority embedded in employment relations. Contributors to an open source project may be volunteers or may be paid by their employers to work on the project, but decision-making on the project takes place independently from the employment structure that guides the workplace. These projects may be supported by a non-profit foundation created specifically to support the project, but such foundations have little authority over their members (O’Mahony, 2005).

A sponsored open source community is one where one (or more) corporate entities control the community’s short- or long-term activities. To refine these distinctions, in thus study, we examine how sponsors approached the task of building an open source community and how these communities differed from their autonomous counterparts.” (http://www.joelwest.org/Papers/WestOMahony2008-WP.pdf)

Discussion

The role of technical communities in corporate innovation

West and O’Mahony:

“To some extent, firms and technical communities have always collaborated (Allen, 1983) to create standards (e.g., Isaak, 2005), shared infrastructure (Bradner, 1999), and innovation outcomes (Hargrave and Van de Ven, 2006) that are bigger than any one firm can achieve.

Empirical work suggests three reasons why firms participate in technical communities.

First, there is increasing evidence that path breaking innovations cannot occur without a community to interpret, support, extend and diffuse them (Hargrave and Van de Ven, 2006; Schoonhoven and Romanelli, 2001; Hargadon and Douglas, 2001; Hunt and Aldrich, 1998; Christensen and Rosenbloom, 1995; Rosenkopf and Tushman, 1994; Tushman and Rosenkopf, 1992; Anderson and Tushman, 1990; Van de Ven and Garud, 1989). Research on technologies such as medical devices, bicycles, computer hardware, and electricity show that new technologies are shaped by human institutions that provide a context for the interpretation and use of such technologies (Bijker, Hughes and Pinch, 1987).

Second, research on collective models of innovation (von Hippel, 2005; von Hippel and von Krogh, 2003; Hargrave and Van de Ven, 2006; Allen, 1983) and on community technical organizations (Rosenkopf, Metiu and George, 2001; Rosenkopf and Tushman, 1998) shows that communities of lead users help firms not only in interpreting and applying new innovations, but in their creation and further development by refining new design iterations (von Hippel, 1988, 2005; Shah, 2006; Murray and O’Mahony, 2007). A large body of evidence suggests that firms in many industries (toys, entertainment, medical devices, manufacturing, sporting goods, music) benefit from contributions from community members (Jepperson and Frederiksen, 2006; von Hippel, 2005; Franke and Shah, 2003; Lakhani and von Hippel, 2003).

Third, although it is not widely recognized, technical communities provide a vehicle to coordinate the work of both firms and individuals in developing new technologies and standards (Rosenkopf et al, 2001; Mowery and Simcoe, 2005). Technical communities offer individuals leadership opportunities (Fleming and Waguespack, 2007; O’Mahony and Ferraro, 2007) and enhance their technical credibility (Hars and Ou, 2002; Lerner and Tirole, 2002). For example, participation in a specific public community (such as standardizing the http protocol as a member of the Internet Engineering Task Force) allows participants to both develop and advertise domain specific knowledge (Fleming and Waguespack, 2007).

The degree to which firms benefit from collaboration with technical communities can also depend on features of the technology itself such as the degree of modularity (Baldwin and Clark, 2000), or the number of complements, linking mechanisms, or interface technologies required (Tushman and Rosenkopf, 1992). While practitioners have long argued that effective management of such communities can help support firm goals (Williams and Cothrel, 2000; Armstrong and Hagell, 1996; Godwin, 1994) little empirical work has been done in this area.” (http://www.joelwest.org/Papers/WestOMahony2008-WP.pdf)

Source

Article: The Role of Participation Architecture in Growing Sponsored Open Source Communities. By Joel West (San Jose State University College of Business) and Siobhán O’Mahony (UC Davis Graduate School of Management) February 6, 2008 preprint version of Industry and Innovation, Special Issue on “Managing Open Innovation Through Online Communities”

URL = http://www.joelwest.org/Papers/WestOMahony2008-WP.pdf

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