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The meaning of openness in open source is both intrinsically unstable and dynamic, and tends to fluctuate with time and context. We draw on a very particular open-source project primarily concerned with building rigorous clinical concepts to be used in electronic health records called openEHR. openEHR explains how openness is a concept that is purposely engaged with, and how, in this process of engagement, the very meaning of open matures and evolves within the project. Drawing on rich longitudinal data related to openEHR we theorise the evolving nature of openness and how this idea emerges through two intertwined processes of maturation and metamorphosis. While metamorphosis allows us to trace and interrogate the mutational evolution in openness, maturation analyses the small, careful changes crafted to build a very particular understanding of openness. Metamorphosis is less managed and controlled, whereas maturation is representative of highly precise work carried out in controlled form. Both processes work together in open-source projects and reinforce each other. Our study reveals that openness emerges and evolves in open-source projects where it can be understood to mean rigour; ability to participate; open implementation; and an open process. Our work contributes to a deepening in the theorisation of what it means to be an open-source project. The multiple and co-existing meanings of ‘open’ imply that open-source projects evolve in nonlinear ways where each critical meaning of openness causes a reflective questioning by the community of its continued status and existence.

Stakeholder theory is one of the predominant theories on ethics for guiding the inclusion of stakeholders for organizations to balance their interests ethically. However, emerging phenomena, such as the increasing importance of organizations adopting novel forms of engagement like crowdsourcing, challenge stakeholder theory in substantial ways, primarily induced by the vagueness of the term “crowd” and how it could or should relate to the organization. In this chapter, we revise the extent to which stakeholder theory is applicable to crowdsourcing by identifying its limitations, so as to allow for a better understanding of the ethical challenges surrounding crowdsourcing. By so doing, we substantiate some of the ethical consequences of crowdsourcing and propose recommendations on how stakeholder theory can provide a response to such ethical dilemmas. We provide one of the first attempts to debate the role of stakeholder theory for future research directions in the context of crowdsourcing.

We propose the use of the psychological contract as an alternative theoretical lens to study sustained participation and engagement in open source, which is often used as an example of new forms of digitized independent work. Psychological contracts are the set of beliefs held by individuals of their personal exchange with an organization and other actors with which they work. While previous literature has tended to study inducements (e.g., intrinsic or extrinsic motivation) on its own, the psychological contract studies the relation between an individual's expected inducements and contributions. If these expectations are unmet, a breach can take place that will affect contributor engagement. We suggest the usefulness of this theory in understanding why and how open source participants decide to stop or reduce their involvement. Participants hold multiple psychological contracts with the project, fellow developers, and users. The findings show that breach can be experienced with all of them either due to unmet contributions or inducements. We suggest further research into such breaches is required to understand their consequences on the sustainability of open source projects.

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Participation is key to understand our contemporary societies. Despite its prevalence, it remains insufficiently theorised in certain context. One such context is crowdsourcing, which has been proposed as a way to resolve so called ‘wicked’ problems. Crowdsourcing has tended to hold implicit ra-tional and universal epistemologies: the more participation the better. Us-ing resourcing theory, we look at a civic platform implemented with the ambitions to change social relations within the city of Madrid. We propose a processual view of participation which evolves in time taking and being given different qualities as schemas are enacted and resources created. The platform we analyse was supposed to engage citizens to become par-ticipative members of society in the definition of public policies. When this does not occur, alternative resources are designed to palliate the deficien-cies of the platform. We contribute to the literature on participation and urban policies by arguing that participation, however it is designed, will necessarily favour some at the expense of others, challenging its often im-plicit universalist and rationalist assumptions.

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