Commercial software project managers design project organizational structure carefully, mindful of available skills, division of labour, geographical boundaries, etc. These organizational “cathedrals ” are to be contrasted with the “bazaarlike” nature of Open Source Software (OSS) Projects, which have no pre-designed organizational structure. Any structure that exists is dynamic, self-organizing, latent, and usually not explicitly stated. However, in large, complex, successful, OSS projects, we expect that sub-communities will form organically within the “bazaar ” of developer teams. Studying these sub-communities, and their behavior can shed light on how successful OSS projects self-organize. This phenomenon could even hold important lessons for how commercial software teams might be organized. Building on wellestablished techniques for detecting community structure in complex networks, we extract and evaluate latent subcommunities from the email social network of several projects: Apache HTTPD, Python, PostgresSQL, Perl, and Apache ANT. We then validate them with software development activity history. Our results show that subcommunities do indeed form within these projects. We find, in other words, that “chapels ” (if not cathedrals) spontaneously arise within the bazaar as OSS systems and the teams evolve. We also find that these subgroups manifest most strongly in technical discussions, and are significantly connected with collaboration behaviour. 1.

doi 10.1287/mnsc.1070.0712

This research investigates the effects of social networks on students ’ performance in online education which uses networking as an adjunct mode for enhancing traditional face-to-face education or distance education. Using data from a 40-student course on Advanced Management Information Systems (AMIS), we empirically tested how social networks (friendly, advising, and adversarial) related to students’ performance. First, advising network variables are positively related to student performance both in the class and on the forum. Adversarial variables are negatively correlated with almost all students’ performance. Second, advising and adversarial network variables are good determinants for overall academic performance; however, adversarial network variables are not influential on students’ performance on the forum. Friendship network variables are not determinants of students ’ performance. Implications for the results are also discussed.

This paper integrates the largely independent literatures on networks and teams. Our objective is twofold: (1) to understand what constitutes an effective organizational network when much of the work of the organization is done by teams; and (2) to examine what the internal and external social capital needs of teams are. We raise questions to guide future research, and point to potential managerial implications.

Governments around the world are moving toward a more global perspective in their efforts to address complex social, political, and economic issues. New requirements for international cross-boundary collaboration, driven by this global view, demand a new understanding about how individual nations respond to public problems and how nations work together in response to transnational problems. In addition, new forms of government enabled by information technologies and made possible through new models of collaboration are emerging. The future of public administration is clearly linked to the development and management of new forms of collaborative governance and the use of information technologies. Globalization is also contributing to the internationalization of the public sector, in which cross-boundary collaboration and information sharing will happen not only within a country, but between nations. This paper contributes to the exchange of knowledge about the future of public administration by presenting a view that considers important trends in public management and public service around the world. As a backdrop we first present a discussion about the emergence in public administration toward post-bureaucratic organizations and interorganizational networks. E-government and cross boundary information sharing are then introduced as part of the new context of public administration. We then draw

Whereas mainstream strategy research tends to focus on atomistic and profit-seeking firms, this study focuses on not-for-profit organizations that participate in a collaboration network. Specifically, the authors extend the resource-based view by investigating how not-for-profit organizations ’ collaboration outcomes, reflected through a joint consideration of monetary and nonmonetary dimensions, may be affected by their organizational characteristics, partner attributes, and network structures. Their analyses of collaboration data from 52 not-for-profit networked organizations demonstrate the importance of unique resources at individual, dyadic, and network levels that allow these organizations to develop capabilities and competencies.

On behalf of:

What forms of collaboration result in the most benefit to individuals who are in the business of creating new knowledge? I approach this question by examining patterns of collaboration among university faculty members with the objective of determining what types of collaborative relationships are most likely to result in innovative ideas and knowledge creation. By drawing on the toolkits of Social and Dynamic Network Analysis, I measure different structural positions of the network of actors based on this collaborative behavior. The dataset used in this study contains publication and collaboration data from 1995 to 2006 for each of 61 tenure or research track faculty members in the computer science department of a major U.S. university. Publication data was used as a proxy for knowledge creation. Coauthorship of publications and inter-departmental collaborations on projects, grants and students were used in calculating several network metrics including the E-I Index. These metrics along with relevant control variables are subsequently used in a multivariate regression model to estimate their significance on total publication rates of faculty members. Results indicate that innovation and new knowledge creation are facilitated by new inter-departmental partnerships

Several studies in the social networks literature suggest that more central firms in a given network will be more innovative, but the literature not considered how variation in network density might affect any innovative benefits of centrality. This paper draws from evolutionary economics arguments to suggest that any benefits of centrality will decline as network density increases, because greater density creates tendencies toward local search that in turn limits firms ’ access to resources that arise outside a network. We use patenting data from almost 2,000 affiliates of more than 260 Taiwanese business groups operating from 1980 to 2000 to test the idea the firm operating centrality will have fewer innovative benefits as network operating density increases. Firms throughout the world maintain ties within networks of other organizations, with substantial variation both in the position of individual firms within a network and in the overall density of ties in different networks. Several studies in the social networks literature have found that firms with more central positions in a given network tend to be more innovative (Ahuja, 2000; Baum, Calabrese, and Silverman, 2000; Tsai, 2001), presumably because central positions offer opportunities to integrate resources from multiple sources in order to create novel goods and services. However, existing studies of how a firm’s network position affects its activities typically focus on single inter-firm networks (Provan,

Research in family business tends to concentrate on the founder and CEO but rarely discusses the importance of the board members in business development. It is the primary contention of this paper that social networks of small business board members have strong performance and growth implications. Analysis of 73 community bank CEO responses indicates that firms that use their board’s networks show higher ROA, ROE, and asset increase.