Most empirical studies of peer production have focused on the final products of these efforts (such as software in Free/Open Source projects), but there are also many other knowledge artifacts that improve the effectiveness of the project. This paper presents a study of an intermediate work product, or informalism, used in a Free/Open Source Software project, GNUe. A digest-like artifact called the Kernel Cousin (KC) was used extensively in the project. These KCs allowed critical coordination and memory, but at the cost of considerable effort. The paper presents two examples of the KCs ' use in the project as well as an analysis of their benefits and costs. ACM Classification Keywords H5.m. Information interfaces and presentation (e.g., HCI):

The structure of open source project communities is discussed in relation to the organizational life cycle. In lieu of sales figures, the download counts for each project are used to identify the life cycle stage of a random sample of open source projects. A research model is proposed that attempts to measure the fit between the life cycle stage and the specific organizational characteristics of these projects (focus, division of labor, role of the leader, level of commitment, and coordination/control) as an indicator of the success of a project as measured by the satisfaction and involvement of both developers and users.

This paper proposes and examines a model of the relationship between elements of product design and software quality in open source software (OSS) development projects. Research suggests that product design, or product architecture, affects work processes and outputs in the production of goods and services. In the case of software, we therefore hypothesize that product architecture affects characteristics of subsequent code contributions, which in turn affect product quality. An analysis of 203 software releases in 46 OSS projects hosted on SourceForge.net lends support for the hypothesized relationship between software modularity and software development, suggesting that the degree of software modularity is positively associated with the number of contribution opportunities and the number of code contributions, and negatively associated with contribution size. In addition, we find that software modularity is associated with reduced software complexity, one common measure of software quality. Surprisingly we find that software modularity is associated with an increased number of static software bugs and number of bugs reported, additional measures of software quality. However, opportunities to contribute mediates the relationship between degree of modularity and number of static bugs and bugs reported to yield the expected relationship between modularity and bugs. In addition to proposing and testing relationships between elements of software development and software quality, we introduce new measures of modularity and software quality. Implications are developed for the theory of modularity and the practice of software development.

Building on transaction cost economics, this work describes the four different forms of communities and introduces transaction benefits as a means of explaining their existence. A research project to investigate governance, leadership, and management in two of the four forms of communities, adaptive and inventive, is described. It is argued that these digital communities are a way of engaging graduate students in wealth creation and thus ‘waste ’ in graduate education can be reduced. 1

Free and open source software has had a major impact on the computer industry since the late 1990s and has changed the way software is perceived, developed and deployed in many areas. Free and open source software, or FOSS, is typically developed in a collaborative fashion and the majority of contributors are volunteers. Even though this collaborative form of develop-ment has produced a significant body of software, the development process is often described as unstructured and unorganized. This dissertation studies the FOSS phenomenon from a quality perspective and investigates where im-provements to the development process are possible. In particular, the focus is on release management since this is concerned with the delivery of a high quality product to end-users. This research has identified considerable interest amongst the FOSS commu-nity in a novel release management strategy, time based releases. In contrast to traditional development which is feature-driven, time based releases use time rather than features as the criterion for the creation of a new release. Releases

Today many companies decide to select free/open source software (F/OSS) products for various reasons, for example, economical or quality reasons. For many areas of application, they can choose from a variety of packages provided by different communities. Introducing a software tool into a company – either for supporting a certain business process or for the development of its own products – may be more or less critical depending on the application, which may range from explorative to mission critical. One of the most crucial problems in the usage of F/OSS is the actual decision to use a particular product. Although this is rather similar to the usual investment decisions, the consequences of an involvement in a software project are frequently underestimated. Whether a certain package is appropriate for the intended purposes in the given environment and is suitable to the overall business goals of the company is usually not determined systematically, but often arbitrarily. However, many important hints resulting from the development context of an F/OSS product as well as other technical and economical considerations could be helpful to make the product decision process more transparent and deterministic. In this article, we give a systematic approach for supporting a decision to incorporate a

This article introduces a special issue of Software Process – Improvement and Practice focusing on processes found in free or open source software development (F/OSSD) projects. It seeks to provide a background overview of research in this area through a review of selected empirical studies of F/OSSD processes. The results and findings from a survey of empirical studies of F/OSSD give rise to an interesting variety of opportunities and challenges for understanding these processes, which are identified along the way. Overall, what becomes clear is that studies of F/OSSD processes reveal a more diverse set of different types of processes than have typically been examined in conventional software development projects. The articles in this special issue further advance understanding of what processes characterize and shape F/OSSD. Copyright

Abstract. Packaged software development (PSD) is largely a knowledgeintense activity. Thus, it depends on the organizational capability of developing and combining market and technical knowledge into timely and competitive software products. Given customers ’ situated knowledge of the software, software firms increasingly seek new ways to involve customers in their software development activities. As highlighted in the literature, one path for doing this is to use online communities. However, there exists little empirical research that examines the role that communities can play in the commercial endeavor of PSD. To address this omission, this paper examines the benefits and limits of online community use in PSD as it unfolds at the intersection between commercial software firm practices and voluntary community participation. On the basis of this examination, the paper presents implications for both research and practice. Key words: packaged software, online communities, community participation

In this paper, we present results from a study of how conflict emerges, is communicated, mitigated and resolved in a globally dispersed open source software development project. In the study, conflict appears in development of an open source business office system (BOS). The BOS open source developers are characterized as an occupational subculture. These developers resolve their conflict through interactions communicated via Internet-Relay Chat, persistent chat logs, threaded email discussions, and community digests. We show how cultural beliefs in "free software" are manifested in software development methods, artifacts, and tool choice, as well as how dispersed developers cooperate.

Keywords, and a list of Authors, each of which is a Person. The schedule specifies the location of ontologies, whose concepts are used in the annotation tags. When you point your agent, similar to the Retsina Calendar Agent [16] to the URL of the schedule, it first downloads the ontologies referred to by the schedule. The agent then parses the schedule with respect to these ontologies and displays a list of talks with a summary of each talk and links to the venue and the authors of the corresponding papers.