“Ronja” is a piece of hardware used for sending data by means of visible light. The technology was developed by users in the Czech wireless network community. The philosophy behind the project states that anyone lacking previous knowledge of electronics should be able to build the device by themselves. In order to realize this vision, the mechanics and electronics were designed with generally available and off-the-shelf components. The instructions for building the device are published on the Internet under a free license. These principles have been summarized under the label “user-controlled technology.” At the center of the case study is a schism in the Czech wireless community over the commercialization of Ronja. The article looks at how the growing market demand for free space optics in the Czech wireless community called forth a redesign of the product in line with the requirements of mass production. The relation between a “democratization of innovation” and the entrepreneurship that flourished around the product was marked by internal tensions.

viii Executive Summary ix 1 The Foundations of This Report 1 2 Fundamental Principles of Trustworthiness 6 2.

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important role that outside innovators can play, look no further than Apple Inc.’s wildly successful iPhone. Thousands of external software developers have written com-plementary applications for the iPhone that have greatly enhanced its value, transforming the product into a blockbuster that has become the center of a thriving business ecosystem. Of course, the fundamental concept of “open innovation”

focusing onprocesses found in free or open source software development (F/OSSD) projects. It seeks toprovide a background overview of research in this area through a review of selected empiricalstudies of F/OSSD processes. The results and findings from a survey of empirical studies ofF/OSSD give rise to an interesting variety of opportunities and challenges for understandingthese processes, which are identified along the way. Overall, what becomes clear is that studiesof F/OSSDprocesses reveal a more diverse set of different typesof processes than have typicallybeen examined in conventional software development projects. The articles in this special issuefurther advance understanding of what processes characterize and shape F/OSSD. Copyright 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

[Open source software and the self-governed community]. Open source software is a public good voluntarily provided by a community of autonomous developers. His production model refers to new developments in the economic theory of governance, We suggest that social capital governs the benevolent community where monetary incentives are absent. However, recent years have seen a rise of corporate investments into open source projects. In this context of hybridization, the self-governed community should be characterized by developers' intrinsic motivation management.

ZusammenfassungUnter Open Government wird die systematische Öffnung von Staat und Verwaltung im Sinne einer Entgrenzung bisheriger Organisations- und Entscheidungsstrukturen verstanden. Ziel dieser Bestrebungen ist es, unter intensiver Nutzung von Internettechnologien, mehr Transparenz, mehr Teilhabe und eine intensivere Zusammenarbeit mit den verschiedenen Anspruchsgruppen des öffentlichen Sektors zu erreichen. Über Digitalisierung, Vernetzung und Konzepte des eGovernment hinausgehend ist Open Government inzwischen in zahlreichen Ländern zum praktischen Leitbild und eigenständigen Reformziel für die Modernisierung von Politik und Gesellschaft geworden. Im Folgenden sollen theoretische Bezüge und konzeptionelle Grundlagen dieser Entwicklung herausgearbeitet werden. Dabei geht es vor allem um die durch verfügbare Informationstechnologie induzierte und weiter zu entwickelnde Neuausrichtung von Arbeitsteilung und Koordination im Rahmen einer bisher rein öffentlich wahrgenommenen Aufgabenerfüllung. Ausgehend von Open Innovation im privatwirtschaftlichen Sektor und einer anschließenden paradigmatischen Abgrenzung von Open Government gegenüber den klassischen Erklärungsmodellen öffentlichen Handelns, wird dargestellt, wie durch Kooperation mit Externen neue Wege der gemeinschaftlichen Wertschöpfung ermöglicht und politisch-administrative Entscheidungsprozesse positiv beeinflusst werden können.AbstractNew models of innovation have suggested that the innovation process of product and service development is becoming more open, emphasizing the importance of external knowledge and systematically involving external actors and sources in innovation endeavours. The growing success of open innovation practices in many firms raises the question whether these principles can be transferred for reinventing public sector organisations. Beyond technocratic eGovernment and digitalization effort, but with support of web 2.0 technology, we present first examples of how external collaboration and innovation with citizens for public administrations can offer new ways of citizen integration, enhancing public value creation and the political decision making process. In the following, theoretical references and conceptual foundations of this development are identified. By intensive use of internet technologies the aim of Open Government is to achieve more transparency, more participation and a closer collaboration with the various stakeholders in the public sector.

ZusammenfassungShared WiFi-Communities entstehen dadurch, dass Nutzer ihren privaten WLAN-Anschluss für andere Nutzer öffnen und im Gegenzug bei anderen Mitgliedern der Community online gehen können. Das Angebot von WLAN-Kapazität und die Nachfrage nach WLAN werden in der Regel durch eine zentrale Instanz koordiniert, sodass Nachfrager gezielt einen Anbieter in der Community finden können. Es haben sich schon erste Unternehmen im Markt etabliert, die Shared WiFi-Communities kommerziell betreiben. Internationaler Marktführer ist FON mit etwa 170.000 Hotspots weltweit.Für den ökonomischen Erfolg von Shared WiFi-Communities (wie z. B. FON) ist die Adoption eines speziellen Routers oder die Modifikation der bestehenden WLAN-Infrastruktur notwendig. Zudem ist es erforderlich, dass die Nutzer ihre WLAN-Kapazität möglichst breitbandig und vor allem dauerhaft der Community zur Verfügung stellen. Nur so können Netzeffekte zu einer dauerhaften Nutzensteigerung führen.Auf der Basis einer Befragung von 268 deutschen FON-Nutzern wird deutlich, dass die Community eine hohe Kohäsion aufweist. So verändern die Nutzer kaum die Standardeinstellungen für die freigegebene Bandbreite des Routers. Zudem stellt die Mehrzahl der Befragten ihr WLAN nahezu 24 Stunden am Tag zur Verfügung.Trotz der Möglichkeit, mit der Freigabe von WLAN-Kapazitäten Einnahmen zu erzielen, bieten die Mitglieder der Community den WLAN-Zugang nicht mit rein ökonomischer Zielsetzung an. Obgleich das Marktpotenzial von Shared WiFi-Communities enorm erscheint, existieren rechtliche Hindernisse und technische Einschränkungen, die die Penetration erschweren.AbstractShared WiFi-Communities emerge when users share their private Wireless Fidelity with others and in return get free internet access via community members’ internet connection. Supply of wireless capacity and demand for WLAN usually are coordinated by a central authority therewith users can find specific hosts within the community.Initial players that conduct commercial WiFi-Communities established their position in the market. The international market leader with 170,000 hotspots worldwide is FON. The commercial success of shared WiFi-communities (e.g. FON) depends on the adoption of a special router or modifications of the existing WLAN-infrastructure. More importantly it is essential that users permanently offer broadband capacity to the community. Only then net effects can durably generate enhanced usage benefits.A survey of 268 German FON users reveals that the community shows a high level of cohesion. Users barely vary from the default setting concerning shared bandwidth of the router. Additionally most interviewees offer their WLAN 24 hours a day. Despite the possibility of earning money with the wireless capacity most users do not offer bandwidth with a purely economic ambition. Although the market potential of shared WiFi communities appears tremendous legal obstructions and technical restraints exacerbate penetration.

Working papers are in draft form. This working paper is distributed for purposes of comment and discussion only. It may not be reproduced without permission of the copyright holder. Copies of working papers are available from the author. Abstract Openness and free information sharing amongst scientists are supposed to be core norms of the scientific community. However, many studies have shown that these norms are not universally followed. Lack of openness and transparency means that scientific problem solving is constrained to a few scientists who work in secret and who typically fail to leverage the entire accumulation of scientific knowledge available. We present evidence of the efficacy of problem solving when disclosing problem information. The method's application to 166 discrete scientific problems from the research laboratories of 26 firms is illustrated. Problems were disclosed to over 80,000 independent scientists from over 150 countries. We show that disclosure of problem information to a large group of outside solvers is an effective means of solving scientific problems. The approach solved one-third of a sample of problems that large and well-known R & D-intensive firms had been unsuccessful in solving internally. Problem-solving success was found to be associated with the ability to attract specialized solvers with range of diverse scientific interests. Furthermore, successful solvers solved problems at the boundary or outside of their fields of expertise, indicating a transfer of knowledge from one field to others.

With the increasing prominence of open collaboration as found in free/libre/open source software projects and other joint production communities, potential participants need to acquire skills. How these skills are learned has received little research attention. This article presents a large-scale survey (5,309 valid responses) in which users and developers of the beta release of a popular file download application were asked which learning styles were used to acquire technical and social skills. We find that the extent to which a person acquired the relevant skills through informal methods tends to be higher if the person is a free/libre/open source code contributor, while being a professional software developer does not have this effect. Additionally, younger participants proved more likely to make use of formal methods of learning. These insights will help individuals, commercial companies, educational institutions, governments and open collaborative projects decide how they promote learning.

Wikis were originally intended for knowledge work in the open Internet environment, and there seems to be an inherent tension between wikis' affordances and the nature knowledge work in organizations. The objective of this paper is to investigate how tailoring wikis to corporate settings would impact users' wiki activity. We begin by synthesizing prior works on wikis' design principles; identifying several areas where we anticipate high tension between wikis' affordances and organizational work practices. We put forward five propositions regarding how changes in corporate wikis deployment procedures may impact users' wiki activity. An empirical study in one multi-national organization tested users' perceptions towards these propositions, revealing that in some cases there may be a need for modifying wiki's design, while in other cases corporations may wish to change their knowledge work practices to align with wikis' affordances.

Wikis have been used increasingly as a tool for collaborative authoring and knowledge management (KM) in recent years. One possible application is the collective documentation of technical knowledge and experience within a corporation or its departments. However, just like with other new technologies, the success of wikis depends on the intended users’ acceptance, which cannot always be presupposed. Therefore, the present work focused on the acceptance of introducing wiki technology in an existing corporate knowledge management (KM) system at an international automotive supplier enterprise. Drawing on theories of technology acceptance (e.g. Venkatesh & Davis, 2000), KM research on virtual communities of practice, and motivation theory, a theoretical framework model was developed. It distinguishes individual and organizational factors and wiki features as potential influences on successful use of wikis in corporations. The model was used as framework for two studies investigating users’ acceptance of a newly introduced wiki on corporate level as well as wikis on departmental level. A third study analyzed the wiki’s contribution to overall corporate KM activities. The wiki had been used to build a corporate lexicon, available for more than 120,000 employees worldwide. Methodologically, the studies incorporated surveys among wiki users and log file analyses. The main findings emphasize former research results about motivation and perceived ease of use as key influences on acceptance of new technology. However, further evidence identified users’ expectancies as an additional important factor. Concerning the wiki’s contribution to KM, hopes of using it as a tool to foster generation of new knowledge were dampened, as it was used mainly for the representation of existing knowledge. Overall, the study was able to identify a number of factors for the successful introduction of wikis as collaborative authoring tools in a corporate setting.

Wiki is a conversational knowledge management (KM) tool that has the potential to alleviate the bottlenecks in knowledge creation and sharing associated with traditional KM systems. An understanding of the motivational forces driving participation is paramount for the success of such KM initiatives. The inherent tension between traditional managerial practices and wikis’ affordances calls for the development of theoretical frameworks tailored to this unique setting. Our study of corporate wikis investigates a wiki-based organizational encyclopedia, Bluepedia. The primary purpose of this study is to provide an account of the motivational dynamics around content contribution evoked in a corporate wiki context. We center our attention on the differences between those who are assigned to edit Bluepedia as part of their job and those who edit Bluepedia outside of their formal job responsibility. An analysis of a large-scale web-survey data from one multi-national firm shows that, in line with the ‘crowding out effect’, those not formally assigned to the task are driven primarily by intrinsic motivations, while are those who contribute content as part of their regular job, however, are primarily driven by extrinsic motivations. The theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

While the pure-form open source model has been in the focus of much information systems research recently, research is lacking on truly hybrid software licensing models that combine limited openness of source code with traditional value appropriation logic. Yet such boundedly open models are implied by open innovation literature and by the recent emphasis on client involvement therein. The further amalgamation of traditional proprietary software licensing with open source licensing can be rationalised through commodification of software, shift from products to services, the viability of the pure-form open source model, and the continuing need for better operational efficiency. After reviewing other hybrid-OSS models, a very practical hybrid licensing model is presented that responds to the need of software vendors in various vertical domains. Its benefits and limitations are discussed, and it is positioned relative to the value co-production (co-creation) literature. A set of research questions are raised to the information systems research agenda.

While the principle of competition has long been found to be conducive to innovation, community-based innovation contests additionally offer the possibilities of interaction and cooperation among participants. This duality makes innovation contests an interesting field for both academia and practice. However, a surge in practical implementations stands in contrast to a still restricted body of academic knowledge in the field. To close this gap, drawing on a boundary spanning perspective, we examine if and how cooperation in the competitive setting of innovation contests leads to innovativeness. Cooperative orientation of contest participants is explored within a community-based innovation contest run in 2009 at one of the largest universities in Germany. We analyse a complete set of data collected during the contest, data from a follow-up survey among individual participants (n = 943), as well as video and audio footage from four focus groups. Findings suggest that a very high as well as a very low degree of cooperative orientation result in a high degree of innovativeness, while a medium degree of cooperative orientation results in a low degree of innovativeness. Additionally, this research extends the concept of boundary spanning by identifying two subtypes: proactive and reactive boundary spanning.

While the motivations of Free/Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS) developers have been the subject of extensive research, the motivations for their initial contribution to a FLOSS project has received only little attention. This survey of 94 newcomers to the FLOSS projects Mozilla and GNOME identifies the motivations for the modification of the FLOSS components and for the submission of these modifications back to the FLOSS project. With the responses, we test a hypothesis based on the previous qualitative research on newcomer motivations: Most newcomers modify a component because they need the modification for themselves. Surprisingly, this is not the case for our respondents, who have a variety of primary modification motivations. Newcomer occupation is discussed as a reason for this difference to previous results.

When considered as organized solutions to problems of provision of public goods, Free/Open Source Software (F/OSS) productions share a number of their defining features with the organized anarchies described by Cohen, March and Olsen in their “Garbage Can Model” (GCM). The open and voluntary contribution of software developers creates constant fluctuations in levels of attention and an extremely fluid participation. The lack of predefined hierarchical access to organizational problems determines a fundamental uncertainty about how collective goals may be linked to individual activities, and in how responsibilities and tasks may be allocated efficiently within the project. Finally, the complexity involved in the collective production of tens of thousands of lines of computer code without explicit coordination creates a situation of technological ambiguity supported by a radically decentralized activity of organizational problem finding and problem solving. In this paper we take these broad similarities as point of departure to specify an empirical model that captures some of the garbage can properties of organizational problem-solving activities in the context of a specific F/OSS project followed throughout a complete release cycle. We examine the interconnected system of individual decisions emerging from problem-solving activities performed by the 135 contributors involved in the F/OSS project on the 719 software bugs reported during the period of observation. We treat the evolving two-mode network produced by encounters between carriers of organizational solutions (contributors) and organizational problems (software bugs) as a dynamic opportunity structure that constrains and enables organizational decision making. We document how stable local configurations linking problems and solutions are induced by – and at the same time sustain – decentralized problem-solving activities with meaningful self-organizing properties.

What types of human and social capital identify the emergence of leaders of open innovation communities? Consistent with the norms of an engineering culture, we find that future leaders must first make strong technical contributions. Beyond technical contributions, they must then integrate their voluntary communities in order to avoid the ever present danger of forking and balkanization. This is enabled by two correlated but distinct social positions: brokerage, and boundary spanning between technological modules. An inherent lack of trust associated with brokerage positions can be overcome through physical interaction or contributions within technological boundaries. Successful leaders are thus the product of strong technical contribution and a structural position that can bind the community together.

Web-based communities have been an interest of social science researchers since the dawn of the millennium. To date, much research into them has focused on the methods to enhance community building and understand those who do not participate in community life, known as lurkers. This paper explores web-based communities as a type of media, classifying types of web-based community such as message boards, chat groups and weblogs as genres. A methodology is proposed based on the Ecological Cognition Framework (ECF) for reading these web-based communities in order to determine their genre and subgenre. Utilising both quantitative and qualitative methods to assess the images, text and other artefacts in these web-based communities, two specific subgenres of the weblogs and directories genre emerge as the political blog and the mommy blog and these are compared with the significant differences that are found between them that make them solid subgenres.

Web 2.0 technologies are now being deployed in government settings. For example, public agencies have used blogs to communicate information on public hearings, wikis and RSS feeds to coordinate work, and wikis to internally share expertise, and intelligence information. The potential for Web 2.0 tools create a public sector paradox. On the one hand, they have the potential to create real transformative opportunities related to key public sector issues of transparency, accountability, communication and collaboration, and to promote deeper levels of civic engagement. On the other hand, information flow within government, across government agencies and between government and the public is often highly restricted through regulations, specific reporting structures and therefore usually delayed through the filter of the bureaucratic constraints. What the emergent application and popularity of Web 2.0 tools show is that there is an apparent need within government to create, distribute and collect information outside the given hierarchical information flow. Clearly, these most recent Internet technologies are creating dramatic changes in the way people at a peer-to-peer production level communicate and collaborate over the Internet. And these have potentially transformative implications for the way public sector organizations do work and communicate with each other and with citizens. But they also create potential difficulties and challenges that have their roots in the institutional contexts these technologies are or will be deployed within. In other words, it is not the technology that hinders us from transformation and innovation – it is the organizational and institutional hurdles that need to be overcome. This paper provides an overview of the transformative organizational, technological and informational challenges ahead.