Syllabus

8/30 No class

9/3 Course overview LAB 0

Skim: Practical OSS Exploration: How to be Productively Lost, the Open Source Way link

9/6 Collective Action, Incentives, and Performance Evaluation - Thomas

Required :

Optional :

9/10 Github and Pull Requests LAB 1

LAB 1

9/13 Technical Infrastructure and Community Etiquette - Seb

Required:

9/17 IRC Field Trip - LAB 2

LAB 2

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 :

Optional :

9/24 Hunting Social Epidemics & Human Timing (Data exploration) LAB 3

LAB 3

9/27 Intellectual and Institutional History - Seb

Required:

Optional :

10/1 Local Pelican Installation LAB 4

10/4 Game Theory and The Evolution of Cooperation - Thomas

Required :

Optional :

10/8 (Class meet in IRC channel) LAB 5

ASSIGNMENT 2: Report on the history, infrastructure, and demographics of the project.

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.

10/11 Project Governance - Seb

Required :

Optional :

Example bylaws documents:

10/15 (Class meet in IRC channel) LAB 6

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 :

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:

Explore:

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 :

Optional :

11/1 (12pm - 1am ) Designing Organizations for Productive Bursts - Thomas Required :

Optional :

11/5 LAB 9 ( Survey Validation and Launch )

11/8 International collaboration / Practicum Updates - Seb

Readings:

11/12 LAB 10 ( Survey Analysis )

11/15 (11am - 12pm) Economics and Management of Modularity - Thomas

Required :

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

11/15 (12pm - 1pm) Guest Lecture - Civic Hacking [Sophia Parafina]

11/19 LAB 11 ( Collective Report Writing )

11/22 (11am - 12pm) Human Timing and Economics of Attention - Thomas

Required :

Optional :

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:

12/6 Open Collaboration and Education; Class Wrap-up; Course Evaluations - Seb

Readings:

12/10 LAB 14 (for collective report writing, optional)

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)