Open Up – the Mission Statement of the Control of Impulsive Action (Ctrl-ImpAct) Lab on Open Science

Authors : Christina B. Reimer, Zhang Chen, Carsten Bundt, Charlotte Eben, Raquel E. London, Sirarpi Vardanian

The present paper is the mission statement of the Control of Impulsive Action (Ctrl-ImpAct) Lab regarding Open Science. As early-career researchers (ECRs) in the lab, we first state our personal motivation to conduct research based on the principles of Open Science.

We then describe how we incorporate four specific Open Science practices (i.e., Open Methodology, Open Data, Open Source, and Open Access) into our scientific workflow. In more detail, we explain how Open Science practices are embedded into the so-called ‘co-pilot’ system in our lab.

The ‘co-pilot’ researcher is involved in all tasks of the ‘pilot’ researcher, that is designing a study, double-checking experimental and data analysis scripts, as well as writing the manuscript.

The lab has set up this co-pilot system to increase transparency, reduce potential errors that could occur during the entire workflow, and to intensify collaborations between lab members.

Finally, we discuss potential solutions for general problems that could arise when practicing Open Science.

URL : Open Up – the Mission Statement of the Control of Impulsive Action (Ctrl-ImpAct) Lab on Open Science

DOI : http://doi.org/10.5334/pb.494

The rising tide: Open source’s steady transformation

Authors : Matt Germonprez, Jonathan Lipps, Sean Goggins

Open source projects are transforming. Today, work within open source projects has come to be influenced by a growing set of companies and individuals who receive financial remuneration for their engagement.

As such, there is a central focus on commoditization and commercialization of open source products, which drives a trend towards a concealment of the various inner workings that produce these products.

Within this shift, the product becomes a central aim of open source project engagement, and the means of production becomes incidental.

In this paper, we explore the HCI research and design implications of the transformation of open source projects as part of commercial work and how we can come to better understand and protect the rising tide of open source projects.

DOI : https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v24i8.9297

Online division of labour: emergent structures in Open Source Software

Authors : María J. Palazzi, Jordi Cabot, Javier Luis Cánovas Izquierdo, Albert Solé-Ribalta, Javier Borge-Holthoefer

The development Open Source Software fundamentally depends on the participation and commitment of volunteer developers to progress. Several works have presented strategies to increase the on-boarding and engagement of new contributors, but little is known on how these diverse groups of developers self-organise to work together.

To understand this, one must consider that, on one hand, platforms like GitHub provide a virtually unlimited development framework: any number of actors can potentially join to contribute in a decentralised, distributed, remote, and asynchronous manner.

On the other, however, it seems reasonable that some sort of hierarchy and division of labour must be in place to meet human biological and cognitive limits, and also to achieve some level of efficiency.

These latter features (hierarchy and division of labour) should translate into recognisable structural arrangements when projects are represented as developer-file bipartite networks.

In this paper we analyse a set of popular open source projects from GitHub, placing the accent on three key properties: nestedness, modularity and in-block nestedness -which typify the emergence of heterogeneities among contributors, the emergence of subgroups of developers working on specific subgroups of files, and a mixture of the two previous, respectively.

These analyses show that indeed projects evolve into internally organised blocks. Furthermore, the distribution of sizes of such blocks is bounded, connecting our results to the celebrated Dunbar number both in off- and on-line environments.

Our analyses create a link between bio-cognitive constraints, group formation and online working environments, opening up a rich scenario for future research on (online) work team assembly.

URL : https://arxiv.org/abs/1903.03375

Les business models de l’édition open source : Le cas des logiciels

Authors : Amel Charleux, Anne Mione

Cette recherche identifie les business models (BM) mis en œuvre par les éditeurs de logiciels libres et open source. Ces modèles requièrent une approche originale des BM parce que la création de la valeur dépend de l’attractivité du projet auprès de contributeurs dont le nombre, la qualité et la diversité ne sont pas contrôlés.

Cette spécificité pose la question du partage d’une valeur qui ne peut pas être anticipée ni formellement négociée. Nous procédons à une analyse quantitative de près de 200 logiciels et réalisons une taxonomie par la méthode TwoStep Cluster. Nos résultats mettent au jour quatre BM, engagement, exploration, expertise et optimisation.

URL : https://journals.openedition.org/fcs/2088

Content is King: An Analysis of How the Twitter Discourse Surrounding Open Education Unfolded From 2009 to 2016

Authors : Michael Paskevicius, George Veletsianos, Royce Kimmons

Inspired by open educational resources, open pedagogy, and open source software, the openness movement in education has different meanings for different people. In this study, we use Twitter data to examine the discourses surrounding openness as well as the people who participate in discourse around openness.

By targeting hashtags related to open education, we gathered the most extensive dataset of historical open education tweets to date (n = 178,304 tweets and 23,061 users) and conducted a mixed methods analysis of openness from 2009 to 2016.

Findings show that the diversity of participants has varied somewhat over time and that the discourse has predominantly revolved around open resources, although there are signs that an increase in interest around pedagogy, teaching, and learning is emerging.

URL : Content is King: An Analysis of How the Twitter Discourse Surrounding Open Education Unfolded From 2009 to 2016

DOI : http://dx.doi.org/10.19173/irrodl.v19i1.3267

The openness buzz in the knowledge economy: Towards taxonomy

Authors : Anna Lundgren, Hans Westlund

In the networked information and knowledge-based economy and society, the notions of ‘open’ and ‘openness’ are used in a variety of contexts; open source, open access, open economy, open government, open innovation – just to name a few.

This paper aims at discussing openness and developing a taxonomy that may be used to analyse the concept of openness. Are there different qualities of openness? How are these qualities interrelated?

What analytical tools may be used to understand openness? In this paper four qualities of openness recurrent in literature and debate are explored: accessibility, transparency, participation and sharing. To further analyse openness new institutional theory as interpreted by Williamson (2000) is used, encompassing four different institutional levels; cultural embeddedness, institutional environment, governance structure and resource allocations.

At what institutional levels is openness supported and/or constrained? Accessibility as a quality of openness seems to have a particularly strong relation to the other qualities of openness, whereas the notions of sharing and collaborative economics seem to be the most complex and contested quality of openness in the knowledge-based economy.

This research contributes to academia, policy and governance, as handling of challenges with regard to openness vs. closure in different contexts, territorial, institutional and/or organizational, demand not only a better understanding of the concept, but also tools for analysis.

URL : http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0263774X16671312

Le contrôle des communs numériques à des fins commerciales : le cas des logiciels libres

Auteur/Author : Stéphane Couture

Cet article aborde les formes de contrôle des biens communs par des entreprises commerciales en étudiant le cas des logiciels libres. Les logiciels libres sont des logiciels dont le code source est librement accessible, et peut être modifié et partagé.

Cette éthique de partage a permis l’émergence d’un modèle collaboratif souvent présenté comme l’exemple type des « communs numériques ». Cependant, de plus en plus d’entreprises participent aujourd’hui au développement des logiciels libres.

Si plusieurs analystes voient d’un bon œil cette contribution commerciale, d’autres font ressortir les formes de contrôle que ces entreprises mettent en place pour tirer profit des communs en logiciels libres.

En recensant différentes études sur ces questions et en analysant plus précisément les cas de Symfony et de Redhat, deux logiciels libres fortement développés par des entreprises commerciales, le présent article s’attarde sur ces formes de contrôle des communs numériques et en fait ressortir les conséquences éthiques.

URL : https://ethiquepublique.revues.org/2275