Investigating Knowledge Management Practices at OpenStack

Knowledge work is comprised of specialists who collaborate by ex-changing expertise and skills to develop products and services - this is exactly what happens also in open-source software development communities in a virtual and globally distributed fashion. In this study, we address some of the information practices of a large and well-known open-source community known as OpenStack. More specifically, we take the theoretical notion of information literacy landscapes to analyze the day-to-day information-intensive work practices in the OpenStack community. We collect and analyze naturally occurring trace data derived from the OpenStack project in a qualitative manner. Our findings report a set of ten information-intensive work practices that in our view merit to be presented to an audience that is interested in information literacy and digital work but not necessarily in software development. These ten practices are branching, committing, fetching, pushing, merging, reviewing, continuously integrating, gating, release management, and announcing. While most of these practices cannot be carried out in non-digital environments, the increasing trend towards the digitalization of work practices reiterates the importance of studying the information-intensive knowledge management practices in digital work.