Research into free and open source software development projects has so far largely focused on how the major tasks of software development are organized and motivated. But a complete project requires the execution of “mundane but necessary” tasks as well. In this paper, we explore how the mundane but necessary task of field support is organized in the case of Apache web server software, and why some project participants are motivated to provide this service gratis to others. We find that the Apache field support system functions effectively. We also find that, when we partition the help system into its component tasks, 98 % of the effort expended by information providers in fact returns direct learning benefits to those providers. This finding considerably reduces the puzzle of why information providers are willing to perform this task “for free. ” Implications are discussed.

Network centric warfare promises to increase information sharing and allow distribution of decision making. This will improve military effectiveness, but only if the situational awareness (SA) of warfighters is correctly aligned. Modern natural language processing techniques, such as Network Text Analysis (Carley, 1993), are designed to infer the cognitive states of individuals and groups engaged in cognitive collaboration and measure group SA by exploiting data on the information that team members access and generate. An integrated software application, IMAGES, utilizes AutoMap (Diesner & Carley, 2004) as the primary analysis engine to take advantage of the large amounts of communication and report text that naturally occur in collaborative environments. The text generated in the normal course of work is collected and changed into forms that can be compared and analyzed. A comparison of networks based on

We thank Duncan Watts for his generous assistance with small world analysis. Mark Mizruchi and

www.sagepublications.com The small world of the American corporate elite, 1982–2001

The core aim of the present article was to give a review of studies and theory within organizational communication. In the first part of the article four influential approaches used in the study of organizational communication are presented; the mechanistic perspective, the psychological perspective, the interpretive symbolic perspective and the systems interaction perspective. In the second part methodological issues related to the study of organizational communication are discussed, and an overview of the most valid and reliable communication research measures are presented. The study of organizational communication is most often related to three different aspects of the organization: structure, context, and process. In the following the article follows this pattern. In part three the significance of both formal (e.g. organizational size) and informal communication (communication networks) for organizational communication is elaborated in part three, and studies taking this approach are presented. Context, being the second aspect, is defined and elaborated

The problems that employees face in locating knowledge among distributed pockets of expertise can be particularly acute in large multinational organizations. This study focuses on people searching for knowledge by contacting other people. The fundamental research questions are: when faced with the need for knowledge, what are the knowledge searcher’s motivations and obstacles to contact one person, instead of another? And when does a person cross borders to look for knowledge, as opposed to source it locally? The developed theory, predicting the determinants of a knowledge searcher contacting a potential knowledge source, centers on four latent constructs: the contact’s knowledge value, the searcher’s expectation that the contact will share this knowledge, the searcher’s estimated cost to obtain this knowledge, and the contact’s accessibility to the searcher. A number of previously identified enablers and barriers to information sharing are then posited as antecedents of these four constructs. The theory was tested by a field study within 12 European subsidiaries of an American HQ based MNE in the software and IT services industry. The sample Data consisted of survey reports from 133 dyads, whose members included salespersons, technical, or industry consultants

Apart from sourcing formal knowledge ratified and stored in corporate sources such as organizational best practices etc., the Internet and advanced information/collaborative technologies also allow knowledge workers to tap informal knowledge from networks such as discussion boards, SIG-based Wikis, communities of practice, Email/Listserv, etc.. However, some knowledge may reside