Refocusing
November 2, 2008
I’m proceeding pretty slowly here in my research into open source software development and communities, and I’m already starting to forget why I’m doing it and what I hoped to accomplish.
Refocusing
I’m proceeding pretty slowly here in my research into open source software development and communities, and I’m already starting to forget why I’m doing it and what I hoped to accomplish. So it’s time to refocus. This is about me updating my own theoretical constructs.
I had said that in my research I’m looking for is knowledge about who holds various kinds of power the organization, over whom they exert that power, and in what way. What I want to do is share that knowledge equally with everyone in the organization so that both individuals and the organization itself can first clearly the nature of the landscape they act in. I do this with the hope that such knowledge will empower the individuals and the org both to first become more savvy about how power affects them in accomplishing their goals and second to allow them to adjust the balances of power in order to better support both organizational and individual goals.
I planned to do this by developing software that can analyze the evidence that organizations leave behind in the process of doing business, specifically, organizational e-mail archives. Originally, I had been planning to work with traditional organizations, but I soon ran into ethical issues largely around analyzing conversations effectively transacted in private and making the results public.
So I want to change the subject of my inquiry away from the traditional firm and towards open source software communities who transact all their business in public. In fact, they transact more than just e-mail in public — there are version control system commit logs, chat logs, wiki update histories, and other types of evidence.
But, open source software development and communities are fundamentally different than firm-based development and traditional organizations. And I suspect that this will cause me to examine and change my assumptions about the role of power, and about the kinds of questions people in OSS communities have about it vs. what people in traditional firms might ask.
So, largely, I think that I need to understand the following questions:
- How does the difference in process and philosophy between OSS and firm-based development affect what I think about what kinds of knowledge about power participants might need?
- How does the difference in community structure and governance between OSS communities affect what I think about what kinds of knowledge about power participants might need?
- What information about power is already available — since so much information in OSS projects is public as compared with firm-based development?
- How are new entrants to OSS communties assmilated, and how do they become full-fledged members?
