How to Win a World Election: Emergent Leadership in an International Online Community

Cassell, Justine; Huffaker, David A.; Tversky, Dona; Ferriman, Kim

doi:10.1007/1-4020-3591-8_9

Cited by 8 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 19 publications

(33 reference statements)

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“…Previous studies of OSS (Conein, 2004;Mahendran, 2002) but also of other design situations (Baker et al, 2003;Dameron, 2002;Sonnenwald, 1996) and other online interactions (Cassell et al, 2005) suggest that a participant emerging role in an OSS project may be dependent upon his or her formal status, but is also contingent upon the participant's actions in the design process and in the online discussions. This notion of role reflects the effective and emerging behaviour of participants.…”

Section: Emerging Roles In Oss Designmentioning

confidence: 96%

“…Several studies of online discussions, and online communities (e.g., Cassell et al, 2005) have highlighted how participants actively construct their positions and their roles within an online community. These roles reflect the frequency of participation, and the content of the messages posted by a participant, and may partially depend upon the status of a participant.…”

Section: Emerging Roles In Oss Designmentioning

confidence: 99%

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A socio-cognitive analysis of online design discussions in an Open Source Software community

Barcellini

Détienne

Burkhardt

et al. 2008

Interacting with Computers

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This paper is an analysis of online discussions in an Open Source Software (OSS) design community, the Python project. Developers of Python are geographically distributed and work online asynchronously. The objective of our study is to understand and to model the dynamics of the OSS design process that takes place in mailing list exchanges. We develop a method to study distant and asynchronous collaborative design activity based on an analysis of quoting practices. We analyze and visualize three aspects of the online dynamics: social, thematic temporal, and design. We show that roles emerge during discussions according to the involvement and the position of the participants in the discussions and how they influence participation in the design discussions. In our analysis of the thematic temporal dynamics of discussion, we examine how themes of discussion emerge, diverge, and are refined over time. To understand the design dynamics, we perform a content analysis of messages exchanged between developers to reveal how the online discussions reflect the ''work flow'' of the project: it provides us with a picture of the collaborative design process in the OSS community. These combined results clarify how knowledge and artefacts are elaborated in this epistemic, exploration-oriented, OSS community. Finally, we outline the need to automate of our method to extend our results. The proposed automation could have implications for both researchers and participants in OSS communities.

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Section: Emerging Roles In Oss Designmentioning

confidence: 96%

Section: Emerging Roles In Oss Designmentioning

confidence: 99%

A socio-cognitive analysis of online design discussions in an Open Source Software community

Barcellini

Détienne

Burkhardt

et al. 2008

Interacting with Computers

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“…Three recent studies of the emergence of informal leaders in online communities showed that leaders posted more messages than nonleaders (Cassell, Huffaker, & Tversky, 2005;Misiolek & Heckman, 2005;Yoo & Alavi, 2004). Furthermore, the extent of "offline" interaction is likely to influence the amount of effort people put into building online communities (Butler, Sproull, Kiesler, & Kraut, forthcoming).…”

Section: Figure 1 Word Use In Leader Candidate Platformsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Emergence of Governance in an Open Source Community

O’Mahony

Ferraro

2007

AMJ

655

455

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Little is known about how communities producing collective goods govern themselves. In a multimethod study of one open source software community, we found that members developed a shared basis of formal authority but limited it with democratic mechanisms that enabled experimentation with shifting conceptions of authority over time. When members settled on a shared conception of authority, it was more expansive than their original design. A statistical test of the predictors of leadership reinforced this finding. By blending bureaucratic and democratic mechanisms, the governance system evolved with the community's changing conceptions of authority.

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“…Attending to the degree of expertise, different kinds of community members can be distinguished. Several studies of online discussions and online communities (Cassell et al , 2005; Barcellini et al , 2008) have highlighted how participants actively construct their positions and their roles within an online community. These roles reflect the project's organizational structure, the technical skills and activities exhibited by participants, and the participants' contributions to the online discussions.…”

Section: Online Communities Overviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

An empirical study of the driving forces behind online communities

et al. 2009

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Purpose -A large variety of online communities have emerged during the last years as a result of the challenges faced by both the business and scientific worlds. This trend has also been promoted by the development of internet and new Web 2.0 technologies. In this context, this paper is focused on the determinants of success of online communities. But, as a difference from other studies, these determinants are analyzed from the social network analysis perspective. Several constructs related to the community organization as a social network are proposed and their interrelations are hypothesized in a general research framework. The obtained results test the proposed model providing the most relevant antecedents of the project success. Design/methodology/approach -A case study based on Linux ports to non-conventional processor and environments is used to test the proposed model. Structural equation modeling analysis is used to validate the structural proposed model. Findings -The main antecedents of online communities' success, quantifying the strength of the relation through the standardized path coefficients. Research limitations/implications -The research is limited to a particular set of online communities engaged with the development of the non-conventional Linux ports. However, they constitute a representative set of communities in the field of the open source projects (OSS) development, which are typically developed using a community of support. Originality/value -This paper fulfils the main antecedents causing the successful development of Internet virtual communities. Instead of using sources of data coming from users' surveys, this study employs community interactions as a source of data. Results have important implications over the development of online communities, like software business models based on virtual communities and open source software.

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How to Win a World Election: Emergent Leadership in an International Online Community

Cited by 8 publications

References 19 publications

A socio-cognitive analysis of online design discussions in an Open Source Software community

A socio-cognitive analysis of online design discussions in an Open Source Software community

The Emergence of Governance in an Open Source Community

An empirical study of the driving forces behind online communities

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