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Collaboration with Lean Media: how open-source software succeeds

Published: 01 December 2000 Publication History

Abstract

Open-source software, usually created by volunteer programmers dispersed worldwide, now competes with that developed by software firms. This achievement is particularly impressive as open-source programmers rarely meet. They rely heavily on electronic media, which preclude the benefits of face-to-face contact that programmers enjoy within firms. In this paper, we describe findings that address this paradox based on observation, interviews and quantitative analyses of two open-source projects. The findings suggest that spontaneous work coordinated afterward is effective, rational organizational culture helps achieve agreement among members and communications media moderately support spontaneous work. These findings can imply a new model of dispersed collaboration.

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cover image ACM Conferences
CSCW '00: Proceedings of the 2000 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work
December 2000
346 pages
ISBN:1581132220
DOI:10.1145/358916
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 01 December 2000

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Author Tags

  1. CVS
  2. cooperative work
  3. distributed work
  4. electronic media
  5. innovation
  6. open-source
  7. software engineering

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CSCW00: Computer Supported Cooperative Work
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CSCW '00 Paper Acceptance Rate 36 of 199 submissions, 18%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 2,235 of 8,521 submissions, 26%

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