In stark contrast with the fully participative "bazaar" imagery of open source software (OSS) development, some recent empirical research has pointed out that much of the OSS development is carried out by a small percentage of developers. This raises serious concerns that concentration of development effort on a few will limit knowledge sharing and underutilize the available resources. Using the notion of strategic interaction, this paper argues that individual developers often interact strategically with other highly resourceful developers by forming a smaller but better organized structure to intensify the types of epistemic interactions that matter most to the OSS development. A general framework of strategic interaction including participation inequality, conversational interactivity, and cross-thread connectivity is proposed to examine its impact on knowledge sharing, and validated using 128 discussion threads from the K Desktop Environment (KDE) developer mailing list. The findings indicate that strategic interaction has expanded knowledge sharing but with the caveat that extreme concentration of development could have an opposite effect. For researchers, this study dovetails the incentive logic by proposing and validating the strategic aspects of OSS participation to better understand the collective dynamics underpinning OSS development. Practitioners can use this approach to evaluate and better support existing knowledge-sharing initiatives.strategic interaction, participation inequality, conversational interactivity, cross-thread connectivity
Within the public sector, the deployment of enterprise architecture is often an attempt to address the decentralization/centralization relationships to improve the links between the central and the local governments. The underlying aim is to provide a better structure to manage the diverse, independent and local IT-related projects and development activities.
In this paper we propose a novel approach to analyzing and understanding the requirements and limitations for enterprise architectures in government.We use the perspective of a complex adaptive system as a metaphor to examine 11 e-government projects with each involved the development of enterprise architecture in the Netherlands (1980s -2004. Through analyzing the key interaction points between the central and the local governments, we identify architectural design principles that will increase interorganizational jointness and IT implementation success.
Two alternative versions of the Team Climate Inventory (TCI; Anderson & West, 1994), consisting of either four or five factors, have been introduced by innovation researchers. This study compared the psychometric properties of these two versions by using data obtained from a Finnish sample of 2 265 local government employees. Exploratory factor analysis of the entire sample reproduced both the four‐ and five‐factor versions with good internal consistencies. When a distinction was made between samples with low and high job complexity, significant differences between the four‐ and five‐factor versions emerged. Exploratory factor analysis of the sample with low job complexity suggested that both factor versions obtained clear and interpretable structures. However, only the five‐factor version obtained a clear factor structure in the sample of high job complexity. Further LISREL confirmatory factor analyses of both samples suggested that the five‐factor structure provided significantly better fit to the data than the four‐factor version. In conclusion, the five‐factor version of the TCI, including subscales of vision, participative safety, task orientation, support for innovation and interaction frequency, is preferred to the four‐factor version because it is more structurally intact and less likely to be affected by job complexity.
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