Requirements for the Summary-Reflection Paper:
For each reading article, you are responsible for writing a summary-reflection essay. This essay should reflect your reflections of the concepts and theoretical frameworks discussed and the confusions you may have.Rather than simply repeat or even copy/paste from original reading materials, please focus on your understanding of the concepts and theoretical frameworks. To be more specific, besides a brief summary, you should have a major section dedicated to the confusions you have with the concepts and models in the reading materials. You should comment on those concepts and models with your own opinions based on working experiences, readings from the library, and reflections of your previous learning.
If you just repeat abstract concepts from the reading materials, you will not earn a high score. You should connect concepts with job/internship experiences.
Journal of Management Information Systems / Spring 2009, Vol. 25, No. 4, pp. 9–50. © 2009 M.E. Sharpe, Inc. 0742–1222 / 2009 $9.50 + 0.00. DOI 10.2753/MIS0742-1222250401 Understanding Sustained Participation in Open Source Software Projects YulIN FaNg aND DErrIck NEuFElD Yulin Fang is an assistant Professor in the Department of Information Systems, city university of Hong kong. He earned his Ph.D. at richard Ivey School of Business, university of Western Ontario, london, Ontario. His current research is focused on knowledge management, virtual teams, and open source software projects. He has published papers in journals such as Strategic Management Journal, Journal of Management Information Systems, Journal of Management Studies, Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, Information & Manage- ment, Communications of the AIS, and others. Derrick neuFelD is an associate Professor of Information Systems at the richard Ivey School of Business, university of Western Ontario, london, Ontario. His research examines IT-facilitated distributed work arrangements, including consequences for employees (telecommuting), groups (virtual teamwork), and managers (remote leader- ship). Dr. Neufeld’s research has appeared in more than a dozen journals, including European Journal of Information Systems, Leadership Quarterly, Information & Management, Communications of the AIS, Journal of Information Technology, and Journal of Engineering & Technology Management. abstract: Prior research into open source software (OSS) developer participation has emphasized individuals’ motivations for joining these volunteer communities, but it has failed to explain why people stay or leave in the long run. Building upon lave and Wenger’s theory of legitimate peripheral participation (lPP), this paper offers a longitudinal investigation of one OSS community in which sustained participation is hypothesized to be associated with the coevolution of two major elements of lPP theory: “situated learning” (the process of acting knowledgeably and purposefully in the world) and “identity construction” (the process of being identified within the community). To test this hypothesis, data were collected from multiple sources, including online public project documents, electronic mail messages, tracker mes- sages, and log files. results from qualitative analyses revealed that initial conditions to participate did not effectively predict long-term participation, but that situated learning and identity construction behaviors were positively linked to sustained par- ticipation. Furthermore, this study reveals that sustained participants distinguished themselves by consistently engaging in situated learning that both made conceptual (advising others) and practical contributions (improving the code). Implications and future research are discussed. keY worDs anD phrases: communities of practice, legitimate peripheral participation, open source projects, open source software community, qualitative study. 10 FaNg aND NEuFElD the open source soFtware (OSS) development model originated in the 1970s, in part as a defensive reaction to the move by some private software companies to appropriate publicly available software into their proprietary applications [56]. Over the last decade, this intriguing software development paradigm has attracted academic and corporate attention [54, 58]. The OSS model represents an alternative development mechanism that can potentially result in higher-quality software at lower costs when compared with proprietary approaches [46]. Fitzgerald [18] has argued that OSS efforts have now metamorphosed into mainstream and commercially viable forms, a phenomenon he labeled “OSS 2.0.” Numerous OSS projects have achieved remarkable adoption success. For example, nearly 70 percent of all the pages sent through the Web are delivered via open source apache server software [17]. gartner group estimates that the market for OSS information technology (IT) services will reach $4.3 billion by 2010. Furthermore, 60 percent of the largest companies in North america planned to implement OSS applications, half of these for mission critical needs [52]. Despite the notable success stories, many more OSS projects have failed, frequently due to insufficient volunteer participation [13, 27, 37]. OSS communities cannot sur- vive or thrive without individual developer contributions [49]. Because participants are often self-employed freelancers and volunteers rather than traditional employees, it is impossible to rely on standard employment contracts and incentives to motivate and retain them [37]. While this challenging “voluntary participation” dynamic has energized considerable research into OSS developer participation [62], most research to date has tended to focus on identifying individuals’ initial reasons for getting involved— sometimes with an implicit assumption that these reasons might also be related to extended participation, but only rarely with any explicit consideration of long-term effects. Thus, the objective of this study is to address the research question: RQ: What mechanisms sustain long-term voluntary developer participation in OSS communities? considering that 80 percent of OSS projects fade away due to insufficient long-term participation [9],1 additional research into this question is imperative [2, 61]. We answer this question as follows. We first review the prior OSS literature, pay- ing particular attention to factors associated with developers’ initial versus sustained participation. The theory of legitimate peripheral participation (lPP) [31] is introduced to provide a theoretical backdrop. One main hypothesis relevant to lPP in the OSS community context is developed, and then two alternative hypotheses are drawn from the extant OSS literature. We then describe the qualitative, longitudinal case study methodology used to examine the hypotheses, and present our results. Finally, we discuss how the results extend our theoretical understanding of the nature of sustained participation in OSS communities. literature review—Developer Participation in Open Source communities an oss project involves a DecentralizeD communitY of volunteer developers who collaborate to produce a software product using Internet-based tools such as e-mail, uNDErSTaNDINg SuSTaINED ParTIcIPaTION IN OPEN SOurcE SOFTWarE PrOjEcTS 11 mailing lists, Web-based concurrent versioning systems (cVS), and bug reporting software. To date, OSS researchers and practitioners have been primarily interested in three subareas of research: (1) developer motivations to participate; (2) competitive dynamics; and (3) innovation processes, governance, and organization (see [62] for a summary of these areas). While much additional research is required within each area, the focus of the present study is on developer participation, and more precisely on sustained long-term participation. The existing literature has focused on developer initial motivation and access. Fac- tors associated with participation have included software use value [20, 25, 55, 60, 63], learning and personal enjoyment [25, 29, 55], recognition and reputation [25, 29, 35, 47, 49, 55, 63], personal ownership and control [39, 63], career advancement opportunities [25, 35, 55, 65], the free software ideology [9, 57], and desire for so- cial identity [2] (see Table 1). Some researchers have proposed that developers may participate to gain selective, transactional benefits beyond the software itself; for ex- ample, by demonstrating their superior programming skills, they may receive career advancement opportunities or improved status within the community [25, 36]. This selective benefit perspective has been characterized as a “private-collective” model of innovation incentives [61]. In contrast, others have taken a social-psychology perspec- tive and proposed that social drivers such as trust and identification, as captured in the free software ideology, constitute the most important motives for participation [2, 57]. Yet others have applied extrinsic and intrinsic motivation theories to understand why developers participate in OSS communities [49]. While these studies provide a good understanding of some underlying rationale for voluntary participation, they do not necessarily explain whether driving factors for sustained participation differ from those for initial participation. In fact, recent research suggests that the original motivating benefits behind OSS volunteerism may erode over time [61], implying that these motivations might not be sufficient for maintaining long-term sustained developer participation. available research on OSS participation has also tended to attribute participation to developer accessibility to the OSS community. although IT makes it very easy for an interested individual to gain basic access to an OSS project’s documentation, source Table 1. Motives to Participate in Open Source Software Projects Motives to participate related literature Software use value [20, 25, 35, 49, 55, 60, 63, 65] Status and recognition [25, 28, 35, 47, 49, 55, 63] Learning [25, 26, 28, 61, 63, 65] Personal enjoyment [25, 28, 49, 55, 65] Reciprocity [25, 35, 55] Getting paid [25, 49] Sense of ownership and control [28, 39, 61] Career advancement [25, 35, 55, 65] Free software ideology [2, 9, 28, 29, 57] Social identity [2, 25] 12 FaNg aND NEuFElD code, and communication histories via the Internet (e.g., see www.sourceforge.net), new and unproven participants are not usually granted authority to make substantive changes. Individuals’ access control is regulated by more established participants (i.e., “core developers” [33]). For instance, von krogh and his colleagues [63] found that while initial access to the community was open to everyone, access to certain areas (e.g., cVS) was restricted to those who took on key technical activities and demon- strated advanced technical knowledge. This being said, although the extant literature shows that participants with higher access privilege participate more actively [33], we do not yet know whether or how an initial participant’s access condition evolves over time, or how such changes are associated with sustained participation behavior. In this sense, most prior research on developer participation focuses almost exclusively on initial “necessary condition” (i.e., motivation, access) for participation behavior. Sustained participation behavior has been largely ignored. among the few studies that have begun to explore sustained participation behaviors, Shah [55] found that long-term participants enjoyed programming and interacting with the rest of the community (i.e., labeled as “hobbyists”), whereas short-term participants were typically driven by an immediate need for software (i.e., use value). While Shah’s study did not distinguish whether long-term participants entered the community as hobbyists from the start, or became hobbyists gradually over time, it did conclude that initial participation in an OSS project was predominantly needs driven. This implies that most participants enter the community with a use value motive, but that this motivation may change for some of them over time (e.g., from short-term needs driven, to long-term personal enjoyment). It is not clear what underlying processes are associated with such a transformation. In a similar vein, Bagozzi and Dholakia