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Alone Together: A socio-technical theory of motivation, coordination and collaboration technologies in organizing for free and open source software development James Howison Abstract This dissertation presents evidence that the production of Free and Open Source Software (FLOSS) is far more alone than together; it is far more often individual work done \in company" than it is teamwork. When tasks appear too large for an individual they are more likely to be deferred until they are easier rather than be undertaken through teamwork. This way of organizing is successful because it fits with the motivations of the participants, the na- ture of software development as a task, and the key technologies of FLOSS collaboration. The empirical findings are important because they ground and motivate a theory that enables a systematic approach to understanding the implications of FLOSS development as a model for adaptation and the future of work. The dissertation presents a process of discovery (participant observa- tion), replication (a systematic study of project archives), and generalization to theory (a model of the rational choices of developers and an analysis of the flexibility of software as a task). The dissertation concludes by enumerating the conditions under which this theory of organizing is likely to be successful, such as non-revokable and rewindable work with incremental incentives. These are used as a framework to analyze efforts to adapt the FLOSS model of or- ganizing for self-organizing, virtual teams in other domains of work. Future developments of this dissertation, errata and discussion will be available at http://james.howison.name/pubs/dissertation.html. ALONE TOGETHER:A SOCIO-TECHNICAL THEORY OF MOTIVATION, COORDINATION AND COLLABORATION TECHNOLOGIES IN ORGANIZING FOR FREE AND OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT By James Howison B. Economics (Social Sciences) (Hons) University of Sydney 1998 DISSERTATION Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Information Science and Technology in the Graduate School of Syracuse University May 2009 Approved Professor Kevin Crowston Date Copyright c 2009 James Howison, Some Rights Reserved. Released under Creative Commons Attribution, Non-commercial, Share-Alike license, v3.0: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/ Attribution can be accomplished through regular academic citation or linking to http:// james.howison.name/publications/dissertation.html REPLACE WITH COMMITTEE APPROVAL PAGE Contents Contentsv I Introduction1 1 Background and Research Questions2 2 Literature Review I 15 II Research 29 3 Discovery: BibDesk Participant Observation 30 4 Literature Review II 63 5 Replication: Fire & Gaim Archive Study 81 6 Literature Review III 142 7 Formalization: An Explanatory Model 151 III Conclusions 195 8 Discussion 196 9 Conclusion 221 Bibliography And Appendices 229 Details of Illustrative Tasks 230 Bibliography 236 Biographical Data 248 v Part I Introduction 1 Chapter 1 Background and Research Questions What if you had to organize to not only do something great, but also to attract the very people you need to do those great things, without any money at all? How might that organizing|that way of working|look? A great deal of literature has studied the more common case of organization in which the future availability of resources is assumed. Teams are studied working, but only after their members are assigned; partnerships between businesses are studied after their members are engaged. Typically this assumption rests on the knowledge that participants are paid for their involvement and, quid pro quo, they offer their working time as a resource to be shaped by an active management seeking to improve the overall goal of organizational efficiency. Increasingly, however, the future of work seems unlikely to look like this. Simply offering money and then telling people what to do isn't always enough to attract the best and brightest, and even if they are attracted it might not be enough to hold onto them or to ensure that they do their best work. Skilled workers, especially in-demand knowledge workers, might be better understood and managed if they were perceived 2 CHAPTER 1. BACKGROUND AND RESEARCH QUESTIONS 3 as acting like volunteers (e.g. Handy, 1988; Malone, 2004; Cook, 2008; Barnard et al., 1968; Drucker, 2002). In some ways it has always been understood that people working together| seemingly without coercion|can do interesting, productive things, but these have been the exception rather than the rule, and have tended to be small-scale and small impact (like managing a local sporting league). Truly hard and important achieve- ments have been accomplished through organizational models with up-front financial investment, strategic planning and just the right amount of incentivized coercion, to ensure both effective and efficient collaboration. Recently, however, new forms of collaboration have emerged to great acclaim. Phenomena such as free and open source software development and Wikipedia suggest that new technologies are associated with new forms of organizing. Whether these are called \massive virtual collaboration" (Crowston and Fagnot, 2008), \private- collective innovation" (von Hippel and von Krogh, 2003), \wikinomics" (Tapscott and Williams, 2006) or even \crowd-sourcing" (Surowiecki, 2005; Howe, 2006), they suggest that there is something strikingly and importantly novel occurring. Yet the expectation that truly important things are not done by volunteers in their spare time is so persistent and pervasive, research ought to remain skeptical. This is perhaps doubly-true when claims are made that revolutionary technology lies at the bottom of such transcendence. The rhetorical record is rife with overblown claims about the revolutionary potential of new technologies and attendant claims of its universal and easy application (e.g. Marvin, 1988). Detailed studies reveal the relationship between technologies, organization and effective collaboration to be always much more complex, contingent and suspect (Orlikowski and Barley, 2002; Barley, 1986; Trist and Bamforth, 1951; Orlikowski, 1992). Nonetheless it is clear that something very interesting is happening around tech- nology supported open collaboration. Artifacts like the Linux operating system and CHAPTER 1. BACKGROUND AND RESEARCH QUESTIONS 4 Wikipedia are threatening long established ways of doing great things in the domains of software and documentation of knowledge. They have emerged from voluntary, non-coerced creative activity and have developed distinctive technologies to support their creation and dissemination. They are worthy of research both for their own sake and for the sake of lessons that might be learnt from them, both for organizational theory and practical application elsewhere. This dissertation explores these questions and this opportunity and builds an empirically grounded theory of organization in Free (Libre) and Open Source Software (FLOSS∗) projectsy. 1.1 Research Questions The purpose of this dissertation is to understand why the FLOSS model of organizing is successful and thereby provide a framework to discuss what can be adapted for ∗The software produced by these projects are generally available without charge (\free as in beer"). Some (though not all) open source software is also \free software", meaning that derivative works must be made available under the same license terms and therefore can never be made proprietary so they are \free as in speech" thus libre.. There are therefore two similar but distinct communities, the \open source" and the \free software" community. We have chosen to use the acronym FLOSS rather than OSS or even FOSS, to accommodate this range of meanings and respect the freedom (libre) connotation of free. Nevertheless, we have joined the two approaches for this research because their development practices are indistinguishable for the purposes of this dissertation. yThe organizational status of, or appropriate analogy for, FLOSS development projects is an interesting research question in its own right. Are they (or are they more like) teams, communities, organizations or groups? Some scholars use team to refer only to the core developers, and community to also include less active participants. Terminology is especially problematic because the notion and extent of the \teamness" of FLOSS production is central to this dissertation. Therefore we have chosen to use the term \project" because it is the term used by participants themselves and leaves the question for empirical data. CHAPTER 1. BACKGROUND AND RESEARCH QUESTIONS 5 other organizational environments. To structure this inquiry, there are three specific research questions, known throughout this dissertation as RQ1, RQ2 and RQ3. 1. How is successful FLOSS production organized? 2. How does this organization interact with the motivations of developers? 3. What are the implications for the adaptation of the FLOSS model of organiza- tion in other environments? This introductory chapter now turns to a more detailed introduction of the theo- retical and empirical justification for the proposed research, developing the research problem and describing the intended audiences for the work. The chapter then briefly examines ways to approach research on FLOSS development, making a practical and ethical argument for the methods used throughout this dissertation. The chapter ends with a short summary of the structure of the remainder of the dissertation. 1.2 Research Justification

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