Theorists often speculate why open source and free software project contributors give their work away. Although contributors make their work publicly available, they do not forfeit their rights to it. Community managed software projects protect their work by using several legal and normative tactics, which should not be conflated with a disregard for or neglect of intellectual property rights. These tactics allow a project's intellectual property to be publicly and freely available and yet, governable. Exploration of this seemingly contradictory state may provide new insight into governance models for the management of digital intellectual property. Key Words: Software, Public Goods, Open Source, Intellectual Property, Common Pool Resources *Contact: Siobhn O'Mahony; Negotiations, Organization and Markets group, Harvard Business School, Baker Library West 186, Soldiers Field, Boston, MA 02163, USA; Tel: +1 617 495 0875; Fax: +1 617 496 7379; E-mail: somahony@hbs.edu This research was in part supported by the Stanford University's Center for Work, Technology and Organization, the Stanford Technology Ventures Program, and funds provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation for the Social Science Research Council's Program on the Corporation as a Social Institution. Special thanks to the editors and reviewers for their helpful comments, to my informants for their time and interest and to Stephen Barley, Robert Sutton, Josh Lerner, Carliss Baldwin, George Baker, Victor Seidel, Fabrizio Ferraro, Mark Mortensen, Michael Schrage, Rachel Campagna and Jason Owen-Smith for their always thoughtful comments on the formation of these ideas and earlier versions of this paper. It's kind of cool to bring the power to where it belongs and what's really exciting about working with the hack...

Information systems success is one of the most widely used dependent variables in information systems (IS) research, but research on free/libre and open source software (FLOSS) often fails to appropriately conceptualize this important concept. In this article, we reconsider what success means within a FLOSS context. We first review existing models of IS success and success variables used in FLOSS research and assess them for their usefulness, practicality and fit to the FLOSS context. Then, drawing on a theoretical model of group effectiveness in the FLOSS development process, as well as an on-line discussion with developers, we present additional concepts that are central to an appropriate understanding of success for FLOSS. In order to examine the practicality and validity of this conceptual scheme, the second half of our article presents an empirical study that demonstrates operationalizations of the chosen measures and assesses their internal validity. We use data from SourceForge to measure the project’s effectiveness in team building, the speed of the project at responding to bug reports and the project’s popularity. We conclude by discussing the implications of this study for our proposed extension of IS success in the context of FLOSS development and highlight future

Project success is one of the most widely used dependent variables in information systems research. However, conventional measures of project success are difficult to apply to Free/Libre Open Source Software projects. In this paper, we present an analysis of four measures of success applied to SourceForge projects: number of members of the extended development community, project activity, bug fixing time and number of downloads. We argue that these four measures provide different insights into the collaboration and control mechanisms of the projects.

Social networking sites (SNS) are only as good as the content their users share. Therefore, designers of SNS seek to improve the overall user experience by encouraging members to contribute more content. However, user motivations for contribution in SNS are not well understood. This is particularly true for newcomers, who may not recognize the value of contribution. Using server log data from approximately 140,000 newcomers in Facebook, we predict long-term sharing based on the experiences the newcomers have in their first two weeks. We test four mechanisms: social learning, singling out, feedback, and distribution. In particular, we find support for social learning: newcomers who see their friends contributing go on to share more content themselves. For newcomers who are initially inclined to contribute, receiving feedback and having a wide audience are also predictors of increased sharing. On the other hand, singling out appears to affect only those newcomers who are not initially inclined to share. The paper concludes with design implications for motivating newcomer sharing in online communities. Author Keywords Social network sites, SNS, online communities, motivating

Virtual communities have been the focus of research for some time. However, while many studies provide recommendations on how to build, extend and manage virtual communities, few verify the success factors they consider essential for virtual communities. Conclusions made regarding basic preferences and distinct priorities of different stakeholders in virtual communities have not been empirically substantiated. This study uses an online survey of members and operators of virtual communities to evaluate success factors discussed in the literature. Incongruences between members and operators are identified and analysed. This research gains first empirically validated insights into success factors for establishing and managing virtual communities. The study results are summarised in ten hypotheses. Key words: virtual community, success factors, onlinesurvey, hypotheses on how to build and manage virtual communities 1.

His research interests are in the areas of organizational use of information technologies for competitive advantage, knowledge management, and the role of information technologies in individual work. His work has been presented at the Academy of Management annual meeting and the Behavioral Decision Research in Management conference. Mani Subramani is an associate professor in the Information and Decision Sciences

Shared understandings are important for software development as they guide to effective individual contributions to, and coordination of, the software development process. In this paper, we present the results of a preliminary analysis on shared mental models within Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) development teams. Based on structuration theory and by adopting cognitive mapping and process analysis, we represented and compared the mental models of some developers of the Lucene Java project. Our analysis suggests that there is a high-level of sharing among core developers but the sharing is not complete, with some differences related to tenure in the project. 1.

Increasingly, large organizations are experimenting with internal social media (e.g., blogs, forums) as a platform for widespread distributed collaboration. Contributions to their counterparts outside the organization’s firewall are driven by attention from strangers, in addition to sharing among friends. However, employees in a workplace under time pressures may be reluctant to participate–and the audience for their contributions is comparatively smaller. Participation rates also vary widely from group to group. So what influences people to contribute in this environment? In this paper, we present the results of a year-long empirical study of internal social media participation at a large technology company, and analyze the impact attention, feedback, and managers’ and coworkers ’ participation have on employees ’ behavior. We find feedback in the form of posted comments is highly correlated with a user’s subsequent participation. Recent manager and coworker activity relate to users initiating or resuming participation in social media. These findings extend, to an aggregate level, the results from prior interviews about blogging at the company and offer design and policy implications for organizations seeking to encourage social media adoption.

Our approach to better understand the nature of collaboration in open-source software (OSS) development is to view it as a participative system, where people and artifacts are inter-connected via a computational infrastructure demonstrating a sociotechnical system. This paper presents a framework we have developed to describe a participative system, and discusses our hypothesis that the framework is capable of characterizing the evolution of an OSS community through changing the participants ’ perceived value and types of engagement. We report a preliminary result of our case study on the GIMP development mailing list as an initial step to test this hypothesis. 1.

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