Software development has traditionally been regarded as an activity that can only be effectively conducted and managed within a firm setting. However, contrary to such assertions, the open source software development (OSSD) approach, in which software developers in Internet-based communities coordinate to voluntarily contribute programming code, has recently emerged as a promising alternative to developing high quality software. Although many high profile cases of successful OSSD projects exist (e.g., Apache, OpenOffice, Emacs, PHP), the harsh reality is that the vast majority of OSS projects fail to take off and become abandoned. A commonly cited reason for the failure of OSS projects is the lack of developers in the project teams, or put differently, the inability of the software project to bring together a critical mass of developers. In this paper, we examine how OSSD project teams are formed. More specifically, we investigate whether prior collaborative ties impact OSSD team formation and developers' joining behaviors. Using software project data from real world OSSD projects, we empirically test the impact of previous collaborative ties on software team formation. Overall, we find that the existence and the amount of prior collaborative relations in the developer network do increase the probability that an OSS project will attract more developers and that a developer's prior relationships with a project initiator do increase the likelihood that a developer will join a project initiated by a past collaborator. We also explore the performance implications of early team formation behaviors. We discuss the implications of our results with respect to open source software development and software project management.

This study examines how momentum shapes organizational risk taking. We define momentum as a sustained and systematic trajectory in performance over time, and we argue that such trends impact interpretations of current performance as well as expectations of future performance. Drawing on the variable focus of attention model, we posit that momentum therefore directs the focus of organizational attention between concerns of aspirations, survival, and slack. Our conceptual model accounts for momentum that occurs within a performance period as well as that which occurs across periods. We propose that within- and across-period momentums are unique in terms of when and how each type impacts risk taking. We tested and found support for our hypotheses in the context of 22,603 play-by-play decisions made by the 32 teams of the National Football League during the 2000–2005 regular season games. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed. This paper was accepted by Jesper Sørensen, organizations.

In order to understand diagrammatic reasoning with multiple diagrams, this study proposes a theoretical framework that focuses on the cognitive processes of perceptual and conceptual integration. The perceptual integration process involves establishing the interdependence between the relevant system elements that have been dispersed across multiple diagrams, while the conceptual integration process involves generating and refining hypotheses about the system by combining the higher level information inferred from the diagrams.This study applies the diagrammatic reasoning framework of a single diagram to assess the usability of multiple diagrams as an integral part of a system development methodology. We conducted an experiment that evaluated the effectiveness and the usability of design guidelines to aid problem solving with multiple diagrams. The results of the experimental study reveal that understanding a system represented by multiple diagrams involves a process of searching for related information and of developing hypotheses about the target system. The results also showed that these perceptual and conceptual integration processes were facilitated by incorporating visual cues and contextual information in the multiple diagrams as representation aids. Visual cues indicate which elements in one diagram are related to elements in other diagrams, and the contextual information indicates how the individual datum in one diagram is related to the overall hypothesis about the entire system. processes are involved in reasoning with diagrammatic representations (Larkin and Simon, 1987). Some studies have investigated issues arising from the use of multiple diagram (e.g., McDonald and Stevenson, 1996), but these studies have used multiple displays of the same type of diagram, each showing a small portion of the whole target (Woods and Watts, 1997). However, issues concerning the coordination of multiple diagrams of different usage, the integration of information dispersed across multiple diagrams from different perspectives, or the information extraction problem from multiple diagrams of different types have not been adequately addressed (Woods, 1995). The lack of studies in using multiple diagrams is particularly detrimental to the success of business engineering, because thorough understanding of the complex business system requires the integration of information across multiple views where each view is a diagram from a different perspective or at a different level of abstraction. Moreover, most business engineering projects require a greater number of diagrams than other system analysis projects, because business engineers need to understand and design both the business processes and the information systems to support these processes (Jacobson, 1995;Taylor, 1995).The objective of this study is to explore the cognitive processes in understanding multiple diagrams representing complex systems. This objective is pursued by 1) extending research on a single diagram to multiple diagrams to propose a theoretical framewor...

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In this study, we focus on the factors that influence online innovation community members' continued participation in the context of open source software development (OSSD) communities. Prior research on continued participation in online communities has primarily focused on social interactions among members and benefits obtained from these interactions. However, members of these communities often play different roles, which have been examined extensively, albeit in a separate stream of research. This study attempts to bridge these two streams of research by investigating the joint influence of community response and members' roles on continued participation. We categorize OSSD community members into users and modifiers and empirically examine the differential effects of community response across these roles. By analyzing a longitudinal data set of activities in the discussion forums of more than 300 OSSD projects, we not only confirm the positive influence of community response on members' continued participation but also find that community response is more influential in driving the continuance behavior of users than that of modifiers. In addition, this research highlights the importance of modifiers, a key subgroup of OSSD participants that has been largely overlooked by prior research.