The reproduction of open source software programming communities

Open Source Software (OSS) development is often characterized as a fundamentally new way to develop software. In many OSS projects developers work in geographically distributed locations, rarely or never meet face-to-face, and coordinate their activities exclusively over the Internet. It is an extreme case of electronic collaboration that illustrates the emergence of network forms of organizations and societies. Past analyses and discussions, however, have treated OSS projects and their organization mostly as a static phenomenon. Consequently, we do not know how these communities of software developers are sustained and reproduced over time. To understand OSS we need to explain how newcomers participate, get socialized, and finally evolve within a project. An analysis of these individual trajectories would, in turn, inform our understanding of how electronic, network forms of organizations work in practice. In this dissertation I examine how OSS communities are reproduced, transformed and extended through the progressive integration of new members. Looking at their relationship with both the social and material aspects of OSS projects, I explore and document the skills, tasks, and roles of OSS's participants. To do so, I combine two mutually informing activities: ethnography and the construction and use of software to visualize and explore the interacting networks of human and material resources incorporated in the email, code and databases of OSS. This approach builds upon and extends earlier research on "software-as-theory" or "critical technical practices." The reproduction of Open Source communities is analyzed from two perspectives: as an individual learning process and as a political process. The impact of this particular mode of community reproduction on organizational learning is then discussed. From these analyses it appears that successful Open Source participants progressively construct identities as software craftsmen, and that this process is punctuated by specific rites of passage. Successful participants also understand the political nature of software development and progressively enroll a network of human and material allies to support their efforts. The slow-paced nature of this socialization process, characterized by its social and political barriers to entry and participation, leads in turn to a highly contingent balance optimizing between individual and organizational learning---thereby ensuring the survival of the organization.