Investigating the role of social media in open source software communities
Stream 10: Technology, eLearning and Virtual HRD
Submission type: Working Paper
Authors:
Zeta Dooly
Research Engineer/ DBA Candidate
TSSG
Waterford Institute of Technology
Tel: +353(0)51 302943
EMail: zdooly@tssg.org:
Kenny Doyle
Research Engineer/ PhD Candidate
TSSG
Waterford Institute of Technology
Tel: +353(0)51 302943
EMail: kdoyle@tssg.org
Abstract
Since it’s advent in the 1980’s, Open Source Software (OSS) has become widespread and is
used by an ever increasing number of software users and developers to the point that it has
become a core component in many global technological architectures. The shift towards open
source has had noticeable effects on organisational thinking and how collective efforts are
managed, organised and executed. Typically, open source software development teams have a
common interest and they develop software using information and communication
technologies (ICT) as their primary modes for communication. The OSS can be distributed,
viewed, used and modified within specific license constraints. These communities produce vast
amounts of data, information and knowledge, which become publicly archived data stores,
often leveraged by future OSS developers (Guzzi et al 2013, Wang et al 2013, Correa and
Sureka 2013, Galster and Tofan 2013, Pagano and Maalej 2012, Yang et al 2013, Sharif 2012).
Recent evidence shows that OSS communities worldwide have adopted social networking,
software and media as part of their overall ICT toolbox, establishing them as key
communication channels for information sharing, project updating, motivating developers and
crowdsourcing. However, how open source communities leverage social media for example,
microblogging, is not yet well understood (Wang et al 2013). This paper will look at OSS as
an organisational form, paying particular attention to how developments in the use of social
media have facilitated it, and how these virtual modes of communication have contributed to
the apparent unbundling of some organisational practices.
Introduction
The motivation for this research stems from an interest in ongoing changes within the software
development environment where technological advancement has revolutionised the approach
to the practices and behaviours of software developers. OS components form critical
infrastructure in global technical architectures and the different practices in relation to
communication, knowledge management and software development activity are not very well
understood. Indeed, the emergence of Virtual Communities of practice (VCOP) and networks
of practice (NOP) depend much on the existence of historic data in searchable formats to
socialise new entrants and troubleshoot issues. With vast amounts of data generated by OSS
communities it is relevant to question the usefulness of social media activity and explore the
trends for different communities.
Historically structured software development methods such as waterfall formed the backbone
of software development in varying degrees of formal and informal process-orientated
fashions. Development has now moved beyond distributed software development in global
offices through to hybrid development models outside the core business organisational
structure. These new hybrid structures include volunteers and Open Source (OS) communities
as well as integrating existing OS components into new products and services. There is much
diversity of products and services developed by OS communities and it is clear that their
working methods differ from those of traditional closed source practices. One of the key
differentials in OSS working methods is the temporal and spatial dispersion of the workforce;
this is facilitated by the use of the internet in general and social media in particular for purposes
of communication. OS products and services are developed by a diverse array of actors
including individuals working in their spare time as well as profit and non-profit orientated
organisations.
What is Open Source?
The movement for Open Source software was spearheaded in the early 1980’s by copyright
campaigner Richard Stallman. Free (Libre) and Open Source Software (F/OSS, OSS, FLOSS)
is software that is licensed to grant the right of users to use, study, change, and improve its
design through the availability of its source code. To clarify, even though closed source
software (CSS) development can be developed in a similar way to OSS, a differentiating factor
is that the development team is often both geographically and organisationally distributed, this
is described as community based development (Joo et al 2012; Von Hippel and Von Krogh
2001).
Prior to this, software was developed within organisations and the programming source code
which was deemed to be intellectual property was closely guarded by its proprietors. Due to
this fact software was released as an executable file only and the source code was kept as a
trade secret. The name open source is taken from the primary request of the original movement,
namely that software packages released to the market also release the source code so that
programmers could modify it to suit their own needs and requirements. Some of the benefits
of OSS include a rapid turnaround time for resolution of bugs or problems with software and
flexibility for users to enhance the software and tailor it to their own specifications. However,
one of the main benefits cited during the first wave of open source software implementations
was the cost; contrary to closed source code an initial up-front license payment was not
enforced. As a result, the volume of research in this area rapidly grew particularly exploring
the business and economic impact (Morgan and Finnegan, 2007).
Early versions of OSS
followed this pattern where established software developers publically released source code
along with their programs and allowed users to modify and debug the existing program.
Evolution of Open Source
As the OSS movement matured the parameters which defined it broadened to include
development projects which were open source from the outset. One of the key drivers in this
move was the widespread adoption of the internet as it became far easier for communities to
gather and marshal their resources in the one direction necessary for creating a purposeful and
communal effort.
While the original type of OSS was initially developed behind the closed doors of a software
company and then released along with its source code allowing users to modify it; newer
versions of OSS projects originated from the internet. They began in various chat rooms,
message boards and forums where a project was outlined and technical contributions were
sought from potential collaborators. The outputs of these projects were usually given away for
free and with the increasing prevalence of OSS came an ever expanding repository of software
which was free and available to use as building blocks for other developments. These
developments included other new OS projects but crucially they also include software
development projects which although carried out by established organisations, integrated
components from OS repositories into their new products. How OS software is integrated as
a component into core products is an interesting area; there needs to be confidence that the
component adopted meets the overall product acceptance criteria in terms of various predefined elements such as reliability, quality, and trustworthiness.
Communication in Open Source Networks
As has been outlined above, OSS networks are spatially and temporally dispersed with
participants in the development process rarely meeting each other in a face to face context.
This bears some resemblance to a typical globally dispersed software development team, but
the complexity lies in the organisational management aspects of being part of an organisation
and being part of a community of developers. OSS contributors are spatially dispersed in as
far as they are often physically located in geographically different places; and they are
temporally dispersed in as far as they rarely work on the OSS project at the same time as each
other. Working practices in most traditional organisations mean that people mostly work in the
same place at the same time, meaning that there are set business hours during which work is
done, and it is done in a defined geographical location. This means that communication in such
instances is face to face with supporting documentation used to keep records. OS networks
which are by their nature dispersed across time zones, must rely on written communication
between members. In the era before the widespread adoption of social networking sites, such
networks predominantly used message boards, emails and newsletters to communicate. The
advent of social networking however means that there are a range of real-time options now
available for communicating in OSS networks with the mode of communication being
determined by a number of factors such as target audience, message complexity, and size.
Awareness of what other programmers are doing, access to knowledge, issue management and
coordination of tasks are some of the scenarios where communication is critical. Yet in cases
where the OSS project is designed in a modular fashion people can take their section of the
work and go it alone until they need assistance or have work to submit. Indeed it is where
critical junctures arise that developers refer to online resources to overcome challenges
(Dabbish et al 2012). They ascertain that generally people seemed to work independently until
certain events brought them together, making the dependency more salient, such as when a
potentially problematic change would show up in the feed, or when a pull request would create
problems for other aspects of the code.
Studies have highlighted the challenges that developers face while programming. In some cases
there is a requirement for implementation specific detail and while programming there is a need
to know what others are doing in the same module. Tools that provide concurrent versioning
system (CVS) services such as SVN can support code management but design issues and
architecture considerations are quite complex to support. These activities are closely tied to
innovation. There is sufficient evidence to show that access to online resources such as
information repositories and communication tools can alleviate some of the issues (Correa &
Sureka 2013, Dabbish et al 2013, Muller et al 2012). Studies referring to coordination tools are
not common in the literature (Crowston, 2012). The coordination of team activities can be
managed through issue management tools but this risks the prioritisation of short-term fixes
over system design. Singh et al 2011 (cited in Yang et al 2013) argue that allocating knowledge
resources through digital social network techniques helps developers to design better software.
This research is in search of further evidence to illustrate that social media communication can
impact software development. Further Yang et al (2013) contend that OSS project success is
mainly dependent on its measurements and determinants, and that the impacts of digital
communication are still fragmented.
Media choice for the different types of communication activity can be a key factor in gaining
the momentum required to ensure project success, increase productivity levels, or support
innovation, often the metrics under scrutiny in such scenarios. It is clear from the literature
that the media choice is a determinant factor, its transparency can affect innovation (Dabbish
2012, Fiji and Saunders, 2011), interpretation of signals can affect decision-making (Tsay
2013) and it can help manage teams effectively (Figi and Saunders 2011). Figure 1 below
illustrates the research problem, contextual environmental considerations and alludes to
possible solution areas.
Social media channels
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
communication activities
Twitter
Issue repositories
LinkedIn
Facebook
Code websites e.g. Github
Wiki
Forums/Stackoverflow
• Community building
• Info/knowledge sharing
• Project management/allocation of
tasks
• Innovation
• Issue managements
OSS developer challenges
• Access to online information and
resources while programming
• Specific implementation detail
• Team awareness of others’
programming activities
problem
domain
Emerging research:




Plugins to existing IDE
Aggregated SM platforms
Integrated SM and development
environments
Traceability
links
for
communications across platforms
Figure 1: Influending factors in Open source communication
The literature suggests that there has been a shift in communication habits of OSS developer
communities to issue repositories and that there is a need for improving communication tools
as project developers often have issues in maintaining awareness over their peers’
developments (Guzzi et al 2013 and Tsay et al 2013). Automatically recovering traceability
links among communication repositories would free developers from the difficult task of
recovering scattered traces of historic communication, and would help researchers giving them
a more complete picture of the development process. Thus, it might follow that tools for
maintaining awareness could possibly improve developers’ productivity. Figure 1 above shows
inputs, challenges and possible solutions to this research challenge and some of the proposed
solution areas from the literature.
There are a number of different social media platforms which are used by OSS developers and
the choice of which one is used and when is mostly determined according to function.
Repositories such as Github allow for projects to be modified and shared by a large community
of developers, this means that this resource would be typically used at the development and
coding phase. At other phases of an OSS project there may be the need for community building
and publicity drives which aim to create awareness of the project in order to attract developers
and users. At this stage social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook are used as a
means of publicizing the OSS project. Other non-social network sites (SNS) type modes of
communication such as electronic mailing lists are also used as a means of keeping developers
informed of developments and updates in the overall project, and other message board style
methods of communication are also used for this purpose. In a traditional style organization
the defined structures of collaboration and communication and the norms associated with
working within an organization ensure that developers are well informed and are aware of the
status and priorities of the project. In the absence of these organizational structures there needs
to be other methods of bundling together the myriad strands of communications which are
typical in an OSS project.
One of the key differences between an organizationally run project and an OSS project is that
of organizational social norms. Norms developed around wage labour relations mean that there
are a number of highly codified and regulated standards which must be adhered to by all
members of a development team. These standards include those relating to working hours, rates
of payment, management structures, work standards and relations of authority to name but a
few. These standards are mostly absent in OSS projects because of the fact that they are
executed outside of institutional or organizational structures and they often do not involve the
exchange of money for labour although there is some evidence to suggest that the volunteer
status of OSS developers is also changing as OS companies such as RedHat emerge in the
market place and other large industry regularly participate in OSS development activities.
These factors combine to make OSS projects potentially amorphous and lacking in definitive
structures of authority as they are geographically dispersed, self- organizing communities. In
practice however this form of organisation in OSS communities is uncommon and is rarely
associated with successful projects. Instead OSS projects usually have leaders who emerge
according to a number of factors including their level of interaction with the project and how
successful their work has been. In other instances, leaders are simply the originators of the
project but the important factor to be considered is that leaderless, self-organising projects are
less likely to succeed, and effective leadership, however it emerges or whatever form it takes
is a prerequisite for successful projects. The role of social media is crucial as a communicative
enabler in the emergence of leadership, ideas and in the ‘training’ of new members and
motivation of members. The following section will describe how communities of practice
which are typically found in structured organisations evolve in OSS communities into networks
of practice which utilise social media and other forms of networked communications as a
means of organising.
Theoretical grounding
Social software is used in collaborative work environments (CWEs) and open source software
developers are one of the user groups. CWEs are software applications and platforms that
facilitate diverse interactions between users, machines and collaborative services.
Socialisation in organisations has been researched for many decades (Van Maanen and Schein,
1979) and can be applied to the OSS community to further our understanding of OSS
development and practices among contributors.
Crowston et al. (2012) argue that researchers need to draw on theoretical foundations that have
been utilized in prior research on social interaction and software development, as well as other
theoretical bases that are relevant to the OSS phenomenon, to develop a more theoretically
grounded understanding of OSS development. What is undoubtedly of interest are the means
by which members are socialized into the OSS community, the comparison between traditional
forms of organization and OSS communities throws up a number of interesting questions. In
typical organisational forms knowledge is transmitted via communities of practice. A
community of practice ‘binds together a group of people who share a concern, a set of
problems, an expertise or a passion about a topic’ (Wegner et al. 2002). Communities of
practice can also be those which are based on a common goal, they can be formal or informal
and are crucial within organisations and communities for the transmission of tacit knowledge
and the socialisation of new members into work practices and getting things done effectively
and efficiently. This type of knowledge transmission is referred to by Lave and Wegner as
‘situated learning’. Formal COP’s can be seen in working groups within larger organisations,
informal COP’s can be as simple as a group of people within an organisation who have lunch
together every day. Thus while some COP’s are institutionally sanctioned and organised, others
are informal and operate on an interpersonal basis outside of official institutional organisation.
Similarly some COP’s can be spontaneous and originate organically while others are
purposefully created with a goal or set of goals in mind. The COP is defined by its structuring
characteristics which relate to decisions relating to the specific roles which are to be played
and who they are to be played by. COP are also defined within organisations as being
facilitators of cross departmental knowledge sharing and creation.
The contemporary organisational paradigm of flexibilisation, combined with technological
advances in information and communications technology (ICT) mean that communities of
practice are no longer dependent on geographical co-location of participants. Thus virtual
communities of practice (VCOP’s) which are geographically dispersed and operate via the
medium of digital communications have become increasingly common. OSS communities are
more similar to networks of practice (NOP) than they are to VCOP. A network of practice is
one which can vary in size from the small to the very large with limited if any barriers to entry.
It usually does not have formalised control structures and membership of the network can be
high in terms of numbers with most members being unknown to each other.
Networks of practice also differ from COP with respect to the methods of communication
employed; in Networks communication happens via indirect means such as message boards
and other virtual media in a one to many fashion. Networks of practice tend to be large and
sprawling in scale and because of both this and the geographic dispersal of members there is
no need for complex socialisation to the network. Communities of practice are often structured
in terms of a mentor/mentee relationship where an experienced member will socialise new
members via training and integrate them into the formal and informal aspects of the
community. In the virtual community of practice this embodied mentor can arguably be seen
to have been replaced by virtual records of conversations and interactions. In a virtual
Community of practice there must be more of a reliance on what Lave and Wenger (1991) call
‘legitimate peripheral participation’. The repositories of historical communications between
community members can serve as a resource which new users can use to familiarise themselves
with the rules, methods, and standards of participation. Thus there is a strong element of selfdirected learning in VCOP’s as well as in NOP as the mentoring relationship is not a social
person to person interaction and instead is an individualised process of self- learning using
community resources.
With this in mind however it is worth noting that it is seen to be good practice in OSS
communities to be forgiving with people who do not immediately conform to given standards.
This is because the OSS norm is that contributors are doing so in a communitarian capacity as
people working towards a shared goal; they are doing this however outside of typical market
or wage relationships. Due to the fact that no one is getting payment or other form of gratuity
in return for their work it is necessary to instil a collegiate atmosphere of cooperation and
appreciation for work done. However, there are complexities emerging with this assumption,
as the environment changes there are many organisations paying their employees to contribute
to OSS development and it cannot be assumed that OSS contributors are non-rewarded
volunteers.
Large scale actions within networks of practice are usually taken on in a modular fashion with
workloads broken down into smaller parts which can be combined and reconfigured with other
parts to make larger works possible. Thus networks of practice are best suited for the
development of modular systems, these systems can be designed by groups but for ease of
development it is preferable for there to be a decision maker or project owner who can decide
which aspects of the design to be integrated and which to be discarded.
Having considered the environment in which open source communities utilise social software
within their NoP it is also relevant to consider that some authors propose that the emergence
of new domains such as virtual societies is insufficiently addressed in organizational and
management theory and suggest it is in need of theorizing (Corley and Gioia, 2011).
Possible use of this research/ Limitations
From a practitioner’s perspective this research could give package managers an insight as to
how OSS developers use social media based ICT tools to highlight updates, changes, prioritise
effort allocation and propose design suggestions to the community. Possible impact of this
research could affect community behaviours, collaboration and productivity and could extend
existing theoretical frameworks on media choice and organizational/community practices. It
could create knowledge that may contribute toward future collaborative software development
environments and could provide evidence that social media (SM) contributes to productivity
in OSS development.
Black et al. (2010) argue that social media provides an outlet for communication in relation to
new ideas, specifications, code design and related issues in global software development. To
investigate this specifically within an OSS community environment would help to further our
understanding on how social media supports OS software system development activities. This
paper has conducted a literature review, aiming to distil the current state of the art however, its
limitations in relation to data collection and analysis mean that the study is incomplete and
further stages of research are required to investigate this topic further. The reseachers have
collected some data from twitter representing the OSS community and plans to analyse this
data over the coming periods.
Conclusions
Large scale open source software projects adopt communication software within their overall
technology management toolkit to address the particular communication challenges that they
encounter. The challenges that they encounter relate to real-time data access, task/team
awareness and implementation detail, currently platforms to support these are fragmented. In
paralell, organisation practices are challenged to address the complexity of NOP, and
communities of developers. Social media channels are widely used in these communities; target
audiences, message complexity, message size and team climate affect the media choice and
potential impact. Further research into social media use within open source communities can
extend our understanding of the impact social media has on OSS development.
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