Skim: Practical OSS Exploration: How to be Productively Lost, the Open Source Way link
9/6 Collective Action, Incentives, and Performance Evaluation - Thomas
Required :
Benkler, Y. The Penguin and the Leviathan: How Cooperation Triumphs over Self-Interest (Crown Business, 2011), 1 edn. video
Gulley, N. & Lakhani, K. R. The determinants of individual performance and collective value in Private-Collective software innovation. Social Science Research Network Working Paper Series (2010). article.
Pickard, G. et al. Time-Critical social mobilization. Science 334, 509-512 (2011). preprint
Benkler, Y. Coase's penguin, or, linux and "the nature of the firm". The Yale Law Journal 112, 369+ (2002). link.
Hess, C. & Ostrom, E. Ideas, Artifacts, and Facilities: Information as a Common-Pool Resource. Law and Contemporary Problems 111-146 (2003).
Cooper, S. et al. Predicting protein structures with a multiplayer online game. Nature 466, 756-760 (2010).
Ostrom, E. Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action (Political Economy of Institutions and Decisions) (Cambridge University Press, 1990)
9/13 Technical Infrastructure and Community Etiquette - Seb
Required:
Fogel, K. “Technical Infrastructure” Producing Open Source Software
link
Raymond, E. “How to ask questions the smart way” link
von Krogh, G., Spaeth, S. & Lakhani, K. R. Community, joining, and specialization in open source software innovation: a case study. Research Policy 32, 1217-1241 (2003). link
ASSIGNMENT 1: Report on your experience contacting and explaining your intention to contribute to the community. Did you follow a 'script'? Was it a formal or informal process? Did you face any barriers to participation? Do you think your experience was personal or general? Please include in your post links to opening conversations with the open project. Include any relevant mailing list posts, wiki edits, and forum/issue tracker contributions.
9/20 Social Networks, Human Timing, Triggering Dynamics, Emotions and Politeness - Thomas
Required :
Leskovec, J., Huttenlocher, D. & Kleinberg, J. Predicting positive and negative links in online social networks. In Proceedings of the 19th international conference on World wide web, WWW '10, 641-650 (ACM, New York, NY, USA, 2010). article
Maillart, T., Sornette, D., Frei, S., Duebendorfer, T. & Saichev, A. Quantification of deviations from rationality with heavy tails in human dynamics. Physical Review E 83, 056101+ (2011). preprint
Crane, R. & Sornette, D. Robust dynamic classes revealed by measuring the response function of a social system. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 105, 15649-15653 (2008). preprint
Optional :
Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, C., Sudhof, M., Jurafsky, D., Leskovec, J. & Potts, C. A computational approach to politeness with application to social factors. In Proceedings of ACL (2013). link
Mitrović, M., Paltoglou, G. & Tadić, B. Networks and emotion-driven user communities at popular blogs. The European Physical Journal B - Condensed Matter and Complex Systems 77, 597-609 (2010). article
Granovetter, M. S. The strength of weak ties. American Journal of Sociology 78, 1360-1380 (1973). Article
9/24 Hunting Social Epidemics & Human Timing (Data exploration) LAB 3
(just the introduction) O'Reilly, T. "Government as a Platform" link
skim Newitz, A. "I've Seen the Worst Memes of My Generation Destroyed by Madness" link (note comment by O'Reilly) about Morozov, E. "The Meme Hustler" link
Froomkin, A. Michael. Read only Section II, pp. 777-795. “Habermas@Discourse. Net: Toward a Critical Theory of Cyberspace.” Harvard Law Review 116, no. 3 (January 2003): 749–873. link
Chapter 3, "The Movement", and Chapter 4, "Sharing Source Code", from Kelty, C. Two Bitslink
Hill, B "Mako". "When Free Software isn't (Practically) Better." video
Optional :
Raymond, E. "The cathedral and the bazaar." Knowledge, Technology & Policy 12, 23-49 (1999). link
Levy, S. Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution (O'Reilly, 2010), 3rd edn.
Belenzon, S. & Schankerman, M. A. Motivation and sorting in open source software innovation. Social Science Research Network Working Paper Series (2009). working paper.
10/1 Local Pelican Installation LAB 4
10/4 Game Theory and The Evolution of Cooperation - Thomas
Required :
Axelrod, R. The Evolution of Cooperation: Revised Edition (Basic Books, 2006), revised edn. : Chapter 2 : The Success of TIT FOR TAT in Computer Tournaments article, Chapter 3 : The Chronology of Cooperation article
Gächter, S., von Krogh, G. & Haefliger, S. Initiating private-collective innovation: The fragility of knowledge sharing. Research Policy 39, 893-906 (2010) article
Optional :
Axelrod, R. The Evolution of Cooperation: Revised Edition (Basic Books, 2006), revised edn. (excerpts) : Chapter 5 : article
Helbing, D. & Yu, W. The outbreak of cooperation among success-driven individuals under noisy conditions. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 106, 3680-3685 (2009).
10/8 (Class meet in IRC channel) LAB 5
ASSIGNMENT 2: Report on the history, infrastructure, and demographics of the project.
Why is the project open? Is it for ideological reasons, or practical reasons, or both?
How big is the community? Where are its members located? How did you find out?
What kind of product is it and how is it licensed?
What sort of infrastructure does it use? Why does it use those tools and not other options?
Feel free to ask the community directly about these questions. There may be historical archived records of conversations about these decisions. Please provide links to any evidence you use in this report.
ASSIGNMENT 3: Blog post about community participation. Incorporate links to your project participation and engage the readings. Do they generalize to your experience? Or not? How?
10/18 Community Joining and Governance (in relation with the Class Collective Project)
Required :
von Krogh, G., Spaeth, S. & Lakhani, K. R. Community, joining, and specialization in open source software innovation: a case study. Research Policy 32, 1217-1241 (2003). link
Tomlinson, B. et al. Massively distributed authorship of academic papers. In CHI '12 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI EA '12, 11-20 (ACM, New York, NY, USA, 2012). link
O'Mahony, S. & Ferraro, F. The emergence of governance in an open source community. Academy of Management Journal 50, 1079-1106 (2007). linkalternative link
10/22 LAB 7 - Meet in South Hall 202. We will work on the class survey.
ASSIGNMENT 4: How does your community make tough decisions? What is it's governmance model--for example, is it a benevolent dictatorship, or consensus driven? How did it get to be that way? Do you think this governance model is conducive to cooperation on your project? Are there hidden power dynamics in your project that influence decision-making but are not explicitly part of the governance model? Think critically about the social organization of your project: could you improve on it? Where possible, link to your community's policy documents and examples of community behavior.
10/25 Money - Seb
Read:
Asay, M. "Fitting the optimal level of openness to your business strategy" link
Kelty, C. "Conceiving Open Systems", only the sections Hopelessly Plural, Open Systems One: Operating Systems, Figuring Out Goes Haywire, Denuemont. link
ASSIGNMENT 5: With your classmates, finalize the survey that you will be using for the class report.
10/29 LAB 8 -- Meet in SH 202 to complete survey and draft outline of the paper.
11/1 (11am - 12pm) Social Networks, Cooperation, and Group Performance - Thomas
Required :
Hanaki, N., Peterhansl, A., Dodds, P. S. & Watts, D. J. Cooperation in evolving social networks. Management Science 53, 1036-1050 (2007) article.
Optional :
Fu, F., Hauert, C., Nowak, M. A. & Wang, L. Reputation-based partner choice promotes cooperation in social networks. Physical Review E 78, 026117+ (2008) article.
Blundell, C., Heller, K. & Beck, J. Modelling reciprocating relationships with hawkes processes. In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 25, 2609-2617 (2012) article
Sparrowe, R. T., Liden, R. C., Wayne, S. J. & Kraimer, M. L. Social networks and the performance of individuals and groups. Academy of Management Journal 44, 316-325 (2001) article
Zimmermann, M. G. & Egu'iluz, V. M. Cooperation, social networks, and the emergence of leadership in a prisoner's dilemma with adaptive local interactions. Physical Review E 72, 056118+ (2005) article.
Apicella, C. L., Marlowe, F. W., Fowler, J. H. & Christakis, N. A. Social networks and cooperation in hunter-gatherers. Nature 481, 497-501 (2012) article
Woolley, A. W., Chabris, C. F., Pentland, A., Hashmi, N. & Malone, T. W. Evidence for a collective intelligence factor in the performance of human groups. Science 330, 686-688 (2010). article.
11/1 (12pm - 1am ) Designing Organizations for Productive Bursts - Thomas
Required :
Georg von Krogh, Thomas Maillart, Stefan Haefliger, Didier Sornette, Designing Organizations for Productive Bursts (under review) 2013. (manuscript will be sent on the mailing list)
Optional :
von Krogh, G., Haefliger, S., Spaeth, S. & Wallin, M. W. Carrots and rainbows: Motivation and social practice in open source software development. MIS Quarterly 36 (2012) paper
Benkler, Y. Coase's penguin, or, linux and "the nature of the firm". The Yale Law Journal 112, 369+ (2002) paper.
Maillart et al., Superlinear Productivity in Open Source Software (manuscript will be sent on the mailing list)
11/5 LAB 9 ( Survey Validation and Launch )
11/8 International collaboration / Practicum Updates - Seb
Readings:
Dravis, P. "Open Source Software: Perspectives for Development" link Parts I and II.
Takhteyev, Y. and Hilts, A. "Investigating the Geography of Open Source Software through Github" link
Takhteyev, Y. pp. 94-147 (105-158 in the linkedPDF) "1.2 The Global Tongue" in Coding Places: Uneven Globalization of Software Work in Rio de Janeiro, Brazillink
11/12 LAB 10 ( Survey Analysis )
11/15 (11am - 12pm) Economics and Management of Modularity - Thomas
Required :
Baldwin, C. Y. & Clark, K. B. The architecture of participation: Does code architecture mitigate free riding in the open source development model? Manage. Sci. 52, 1116-1127 (2006) paper
Optional :
- MacCormack, A., Rusnak, J. & Baldwin, C. Y. Exploring the structure of complex software designs: An empirical study of open source and proprietary code. Management Science 52, 1015-1030 (2006) paper.
- MacCormack, A., Baldwin, C. & Rusnak, J. Exploring the duality between product and organizational architectures: A test of the "mirroring" hypothesis. Research Policy 41, 1309-1324 (2012) paper.
- Maillart, T., Sornette, D., Spaeth, S. & von Krogh, G. Empirical tests of zipf's law mechanism in open source linux distribution. Physical Review Letters 101, 218701+ (2008) paper.
- Simon, H. The architecture of complexity. Proceeding of American Philosophy Society 106, 467-482 (1962) paper.
- Gal, M. S. Viral open source: Competition vs. synergy. Journal of Competition Law and Economics (2012) paper
11/22 (11am - 12pm) Human Timing and Economics of Attention - Thomas
Required :
Maillart, T., Sornette, D., Frei, S., Duebendorfer, T. & Saichev, A. Quantification of deviations from rationality with heavy tails in human dynamics. Physical Review E 83, 056101+ (2011). preprint
Optional :
Barabási, A.-L. The origin of bursts and heavy tails in human dynamics. Nature 435, 207-211 (2005). URL http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature03459.
11/22 (12pm - 1pm) Guest Lecture - Project Teams in Community and Commercial Open Source Software Projects - Tony Wasserman [Carnegie Mellon Silicon Valley]
This talk describes the recent evolution of business strategies used by companies offering products and services based on free and open source software (FOSS). The talk compares their practices with traditional proprietary software companies and with community-based open source projects, and identifies growing overlaps between the different kinds of software companies. We focus on the similarities and differences among development teams on various open source projects, describing the variations in project governance and the nature of communities in both commercial and community open source projects, including the issues that lead to success or failure of such projects.
11/26 LAB 12 ( Collective Report, First Complete Draft )
12/03 LAB 13 (collective report writing , if needed)
ASSIGNMENT 6: Where does the funding for you community come from? Is there corporate sponsorship? A foundation that backs it? Do users donate? How does this affect the community's cooperative dynamics? Are there competing projects? How would you describe your project's role in the greater technical ecosystem?
12/6 (11am - 12pm) Guest Facilitator - Gender and Open Source [Rochelle Terman]
Readings:
TBD
12/6 Open Collaboration and Education; Class Wrap-up; Course Evaluations - Seb
Readings:
Ellis, H.J.C., Morelli, R., de Lanerolle, T., Damon, J. and Raye, J. Can humanitarian open-source software development draw new students to CS? In Proceedings of the 38th SIGCSE Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education (Covington, Kentucky, USA), March 2007, pp. 551-555. pdf
ASSIGNMENT 7: Does your project's community mirror the technical modularity of the project? How does it structure its collaboration--synchronously? Asyncronously? How does it get work done?
12/13 Optional meeting in SH 210 for report writing
12/16 Final blog post revisions due
12/17 LAB 15 (collective report writing, if needed)
12/20 Collective Report due, if not finished earlier (no class)