Tag Archives: Conference

Community Manager Gathering 2019

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Community managers are accustomed to meet before OSCON. This year, Community Manager Gathering served this need.

The morning was planned with talks. We had very interesting talks that sparked a lot of conversation, pushing back subsequent talks. We applied the flexibility required of managing communities to our gathering and made the best of our engagement.

The afternoon was planned for unconference sessions. I personally love the unconference format, because it sparks real conversations that are unplanned and very natural.

Talk: Growing a community through diversity and inclusion metrics

Nicole Huesman and I presented a talk on “Growing a community through diversity and inclusion metrics”. We based the talk on our experience working with diversity and inclusion efforts. For me, this was mostly the work in the CHAOSS D&I Working Group and my dissertation work. The slides are available online.

Unconference session: Community Metrics (CHAOSS)

My favorite unconference session was about measuring community health. I facilitated the session and brought in experience from the CHAOSS project.

We discussed the process of defining metrics in the CHAOSS project, specifically the history and how we work in working groups.

We talked about metrics that are used by different participants, specifically sharing the experience that metrics are a tool to telling stories and themselves are meaningless.

The danger we all acknowledge is that metrics can be misused by people who don’t understand a community. A problem with metrics released by CHAOSS may be that these metrics seem endorsed by CHAOSS and people reflect less on whether and in what situations a metric should be used.

Next year

Next year, the Community Leadership Summit may return to OSCON. Or, we may have a second version of the Community Manager Gathering. If anyone is interested in helping with next year’s meeting, please speak out.

Update: Jono Bacon announced that CLS will return in 2020.

New Paper: “Eight Observations and 24 Research Questions About Open Source Projects: Illuminating New Realities”

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I am excited about this paper because we point out ways in which open source is evolving. And let me tell you, open source is changing a lot. This is relevant for researchers, because it shapes the story we can tell and the kind of questions most interesting. In fact, we identify 24 research questions we find intriguing.

Paper Abstract:

The rapid acceleration of corporate engagement with open source projects is drawing out new ways for CSCW researchers to consider the dynamics of these projects. Research must now consider the complex ecosystems within which open source projects are situated, including issues of for-profit motivations, brokering foundations, and corporate collaboration. Localized project considerations cannot reveal broader workings of an open source ecosystem, yet much empirical work is constrained to a local context. In response, we present eight observations from our eight-year engaged field study about the changing nature of open source projects. We ground these observations through 24 research questions that serve as primers to spark research ideas in this new reality of open source projects. This paper contributes to CSCW in social and crowd computing by delivering a rich and fresh look at corporately-engaged open source projects with a call for renewed focus and research into newly emergent areas of interest.

Read more..
This paper is open access and available from the ACM Digital Library.

 Full reference:

Germonprez, M., Link, G. J.P., Lumbard, K., & Goggins, S. (2018). Eight Observations and 24 Research Questions About Open Source Projects: Illuminating New Realities. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, 2(CSCW), 57:1–57:22. https://doi.org/10.1145/3274326

New Paper: “Open Data Standards for Open Source Software Risk Management Routines: An Examination of SPDX”

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I presented our paper Open Data Standards for Open Source Software Risk Management Routines: An Examination of SPDX at the ACM GROUP conference in Florida. GROUP is a single-track conference with a great group of participants. I enjoyed the interactions and presentations. GROUP is definitely worth going again. Also, single-track conferences may be my new preferences, because I do not have to decide which of several interesting session to go to.

Paper Abstract:

As the organizational use of open source software (OSS) increases, it requires the adjustment of organizational routines to manage new OSS risk. These routines may be influenced by community-developed open data standards to explicate, analyze, and report OSS risks. Open data standards are co-created in open communities for unifying the exchange of information. The SPDX® specification is such an open data standard to explicate and share OSS risk information. The development and subsequent adoption of SPDX raises the questions of how organizations make sense of SPDX when improving their own risk management routines, and of how a community benefits from the experiential knowledge that is contributed back by organizational adopters. To explore these questions, we conducted a single case, multi-component field study, connecting with members of organizations that employed SPDX. The results of this study contribute to understanding the development and adoption of open data standards within open source environments.

Read more…
The paper is Open Access and is available in the ACM Digital Library.

Full reference:

Gandhi, R., Germonprez, M., & Link, G. J. P. (2018). Open data standards for open source software risk management routines: an examination of SPDX. In Proceedings of ACM GROUP ’18 (pp. 219–229). Sanibel Island, Florida, USA: ACM. https://doi.org/10.1145/3148330.3148333

New Paper: “Contemporary Issues of Open Data in Information Systems Research: Considerations and Recommendations”

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We hosted a workshop in Dublin before ICIS 2016. The workshop was on open data in information systems research. I lead the write up of our workshop report and am proud to say that we published it in the Communications of the Association for Information Systems journal.

Paper Abstract:

Researchers, governments, and funding agencies are calling on research disciplines to embrace open data – data that is publicly accessible and usable beyond the original authors. The premise is that research efforts can draw and generate several benefits from open data, as such data might provide further insight, enabling the replication and extension of current knowledge in different contexts. These potential benefits, coupled with a global push towards open data policies, brings open data into the agenda of research disciplines – including Information Systems (IS). This paper responds to these developments as follows. We outline themes in the ongoing discussion around open data in the IS discipline. The themes fall into two clusters: (1) The motivation for open data includes themes of mandated sharing, benefits to the research process, extending the life of research data, and career impact; (2) The implementation of open data includes themes of governance, socio-technical system, standards, data quality, and ethical considerations. In this paper, we outline the findings from a pre-ICIS 2016 workshop on the topic of open data. The workshop discussion confirmed themes and identified issues that require attention in terms of the approaches that are currently utilized by IS researchers. The IS discipline offers a unique knowledge base, tools, and methods that can advance open data across disciplines. Based on our findings, we provide suggestions on how IS researchers can drive the open data conversation. Further, we provide advice for the adoption and establishment of procedures and guidelines for the archival, evaluation, and use of open data.

Full reference:

Link, G. J. P., Lumbard, K., Conboy, K., Feldman, M., Feller, J., George, J., … Willis, M. (2017). Contemporary Issues of Open Data in Information Systems Research: Considerations and Recommendations. Communications of the Association for Information Systems, 41(Article 25), 587–610. Retrieved from http://aisel.aisnet.org/cais/vol41/iss1/25/

Master Thesis Presented at CRIWG 2015

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Ufff… so much work. For my master thesis project, I built a software prototype and recruited close to one hundred participants to test it in a controlled experiment. Going into the project, I set myself the goal to publish the results. I achieved this goal when my advisor, Dominik Siemon, presented the findings at CRIWG 2015. The title of the paper is Evaluating Anchored Discussion to Foster Creativity in Online Collaboration.

Paper abstract:

Open innovation and crowdsourcing ideas rely on people to be creative through an online collaboration system. Creativity in online groups depends heavily on the interaction between group members. Anchored discussion was evaluated in a preliminary laboratory experiment as a new mode for creative interaction. In anchored discussion every comment is tied to some aspect of the idea. This first exploration generated novel insights for additional and refined research. Results indicate that anchored discussion leads to a more structured discussion amongst group members. For the same level of creativity, groups using anchored discussion needed less interaction and less discussion than the control groups. In a post session survey, participants made several suggestions on how to improve anchored discussion. We conclude that anchored discussion is promising as a new tool to aid online groups in creative collaboration.

Full reference:

Link, G. J.P., Siemon, D., de Vreede, G.-J., & Robra-Bissantz, S. (2015). Evaluating Anchored Discussion to Foster Creativity in Online Collaboration. In N. Baloian, Y. Zorian, P. Taslakian, & S. Shoukouryan (Eds.), Collaboration and Technology (pp. 28–44). Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-22747-4_3