ICTlogy

Quick, brief introductions to tools used by researchers in the management of their… uh, life?

BibCiter

• http://bibciter.sourceforge.net
• by Ismael Peña-López

Free software bibliographic manager. Allows both management of bibliographies and publication on the net (RSS feed included)

Yep

• http://yepthat.com
• by Daithí Mac Síthigh

File manager. Mostly for PDFs you can tag. Mac version only.

LinkedIn

• http://linkedin.com
• by Marcus Foth

Social networking. Really effective as based on degrees of separation”

Dopplr

• http://dopplr.com
• by Marcus Foth

To manage one’s trips. Export to calendar by iCal. Shows who else is going to be in that place.

ClaimID

• http://claimid.com/
• by Fred Stutzman

User centered identity. Avoid inconsistent identities over different websites.

HyperPo

• http://tapor.ca
• by Peter Ryan

Text analysis. Frequencies of words, information about the text.

Dapper

• http://www.dapper.net/
• by Peter Ryan

Data mapper.

del.icio.us

• http://del.icio.us
• by Alla Zollers

Social bookmarking

ma.gnolia.com

• http://ma.gnolia.com
• by Alla Zollers

Social bookmarking. You can have groups

Student research seminar: Cindy Shen

Two metaphors– “the cathedral and the bazaar” – are widely used to characterize the organizational structure of the development model of commercial software and that of OSS. While “cathedral” represents rigid hierarchy and centralized control, the “bazaar” model of OSS represents an egalitarian network of developers free of hierarchical structure. Powerful as they are, these two metaphors may help to spread a rather stylized image of the OSS. Empirical studies of OSS show highly skewed distribution and power law relationships of project sizes, project membership, and cluster sizes of the OSS community, but the underlying mechanisms of those power law relationships remain under explored.

This on-going project extends knowledge on OSS by empirically examining the social structure of the OSS community and the mechanisms of the developer network formation. Two research questions are asked: 1) To what extent is OSS community hierarchical? 2) What attributes of the developers are associated with network structure? A developer network was extracted from the SourceForge.net data archive, in which nodes represent developers and links are defined as co-participation in the same projects. In the presentation I will show some preliminary results from p* network analysis, and also plans for future research.

It does not seem that the two models presented by Raymond (1999) are that polarized:

• the importance of project leadership suggests the presence of hierarchy
• Highly skewed distributino of projects
• Power-law relationshiop
• The “lone” developer

It would be interesting to abandon flagship projects (e.g. Linux) and analyze failing projects too. Also try and go beyond case studies and non-representative samples.

Is Open Source Software (OSS) a network form of organization? does power come from authority, resource control and network centrality? (Astley and Sacheva, 1984). Is power acquired by one’s position in the network?

Or is OSS formed through reputation mechanisms? Coordination mechanisms in a network form of organization come from trust, reputation, status, legitimacy… Do people with reputation/status attract ties? And the contrary, does reputation is achievable through network membership?

My reflections

• Lone leaders might actually be webmasters that just got their admin account at SourceForge just to upload the packager

More info

• Working Paper
• Presentation at the 27th Sunbelt Social Network Conference
• PNet
• Raymond, E. S. (1999). The Cathedral & the Bazaar. (revised edition: original edition 1999). Sebastopol: O´Reilly.

Student research seminar: Rachel Cobcroft

In his consideration of Verkeersbordvrij, Jonathan Zittrain poses the challenge of identifying the technical tools and social structures that inspire people to act humanely online. This presentation engages with the notions of philanthropy and gift giving in virtual communities, seeking to understand the factors that motivate members of Flickr.com to share their images under Creative Commons licensing. It seeks to identify the tipping point at which an individual’s focus is turned from their own ‘life blog’ towards participation in an online community, aspiring to collaborative, commons-based peer production. Investigating frameworks of P2P and integral theory and employing the methods of virtual ethnography, this research explores the way in which the wisdom of the crowd may be harnessed ethically and sustainedly, pointing towards best practice business models for web 2.0.

What’s like the framework that engages collective creation?

Factors influencing participation (4C)

• Convergence – Technical
• Community – Social
• Commons-based Creativity – Legal
• Commerce – Economic

Collaboration is the killer app
User-led development
The ‘produser’ (producer+user)
Life-caching

Motivations to Participate

Hemetsberger’s (2003) Motivational Framework:

• Task- and Product-Related motivation
• Long-term utilitarian goals and social significance
• Internalized group goals and services
• Socio-emotional Relationships

More info

• Free Culture, by Lawrence Lessig
• Sharing Nicely and Wealth of Networks, by Yochai Benkler
• Why Hackers Do What They Do, by Karim Lakhani
• Peer to Peer Foundation, by Michel Bauwen; Cooperation Commons, by Howard Rheingold
• Fostering Cooperation on the Internet, by Andrea Hemetsberger
• ccMixter
• Rachel Cobcroft (2007) Open Your APIs: Flickr’s Perspectives on Play
• Benkler, Y. (2006). The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom. New Haven: Yale University Press.
• Rachel Cobcroft shares Flickr wisdom, by Daithí Mac Síthigh

Lead: Talha Syed

The main criticism Talha Syed makes is that it should be possible to shift the debate from the established mainstream (economic) discourse (for or against, but inside the system) and try and move towards new mental maps, new ways of thinking.

Premises of conventional approach

• homo aeconomicus: man is naturally narrowlyh self-regarding material gain
• preferences fixed, invariant
• policy is neutral

Premises of most critics

• heterogeneous rather than unitary motives
• but still relatively exogenous to policy
• policy should be neutral (efficiency)

Further departures

• heterogeneous
• but context-sensitive, exogenous to policy, culture
• normatively, neutrality untenable, undesirable

Pluralist motives

• intrinsic: internal drives and ambitions; enjoyment
• social: activity’s social contribution; peer approval/credit; social recognition/esteem
• extrinsic: prosperity, wealth; social status, hierarchy; power

We should ask ourselves whether it’s true that once you throw money on the table, the economical / homo aeconomicus / extrinsic reasons to create do crowd out the other two categories of motives. It usually has been stated that yes, but there are no serious positive analysis about this. Yochai Benkler might do right in describing what’s happening in the generative Internet, but he somehow manages to shape the whole thing into Liberalism. But, should it have to be this way? Is this the only way? Is there no alternative?

Context Sensitive

What mix of motives flourishes depends on which motives are:

• socially acknowledged, valued
• expressed or pursued by peers, rivals, leaders
• reinforced or undermined by institutional signals

And maybe there’s some room for policy makers and policies to reinforce or give incentives to one or another motive depending on the context given.

Open Science

• Sustaining foundational, exploratory research: markets under-incentive for these; provides a somewhat de-centralized alternative to state direction
• Relatively rapid dissemination: rapid growth; cutting down on reducing duplicative failures and successes
• Quality controls: less internal conflicts of interest; no property barrier to peer review (and strong incentives for it)
• Effective and cost-effective: scientists being motivated partly by pleasures of inquiry and desire for credit and satisfactions of social contribution contributes to effective performance (Henderson & Cockburn, 2001); also is cost-effective
• Intrinsic virtues of these motivations: sustaining such a a motivational culture is arguably worth valuing intrinsically, for its own sake, as part of what constitutes an attractive scientific culture and surrounding society

Crowding out

Raising money incentives can dampen non-monetary motives:

• undermining social meaning of a practice
• undermining responsibility, self-direction
• undermining self-esteem
• reducing overall gain from activity by making unavailable those benefits which simply can’t co-exist with money payment
• corroding non-monetary virtues

My reflections

• I think that for those policies to foster other motivations, we should somehow let entrepreneurs understand those policies as not ways to benefit dumping of one’s market. Actually, most reinforcements of IP rights/regulation are just reactions to, I guess, such a feeling.

Readings

More info

• Henderson, Rebecca; Cockburn, Iain M. (2001) “Publicly Funded Science and the Productivity of the Pharmaceutical Industry” In Adam B. Jaffe, Scott Stern, Joshua Lerner (Eds) Innovation Policy and the Economy. Cambridge: The MIT Press

Leads: Karim Lakhani

This talk will focus on how firms and communities are leveraging external sources of knowledge and talent for innovation. We will discuss the practices that are enabling a new paradigm of open innovation and consider their applicability to established firms. The talk will present results from newly emerging research on open source communities and the pharmaceutical industry to develop an understanding about new strategies for innovation. The first part of the talk will discuss how R&D labs in science-based firms are broadcasting their most difficult scientific problems to large networks of scientists around the world and the success they are achieving by tapping into distributed sources of knowledge. Key drivers for success in a distributed knowledge environment will be presented. The second part of the talk will focus on how open source communities are pioneering a radical model for innovation where new functionality and features get developed by a large and distributed community. We will consider the challenges of organizing a distributed innovation process and how firms, large and small, are participating as partners with the various communities.

Joy: No matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for someone else (1998)
Hayek: Knowledge is Unevenly Distributed (1945)
Von Hippel: Knowledge is Sticky (1994)

So the question is: how do we build an architecture, a system that attracts this so much knowledge? Users innovate and they do it outside of the R&D laboratory.

Motivations

• User needs: personal and professional
• Community – Freedom – Belonging
• Fun & Enjoyment

Distributed Innovation (1-3, need driven; 4-6, solution driven)

1. Users in the field experience needs way ahead of manufacturers
2. Need is urgent so users go ahead and solve local problem
3. Manufacturers later figure out how to incorporate user innovations into products
4. Firms encounter problems that they cannot solve internally
5. Look outside for help in developing a solution
6. Outisders typically have solved problem in their own domains and can easily port solution to firm’s domain

My reflections

• I wonder if the fact of belonging to a community is, more than a social/emotional need, is an economic/vital need. In an Information Society, being connected is a constant need, specially if you’re a knowledge worker. And connection to the network is established not just by lurking but also by contributing (I owe some of these thoughts to my friend Genís Roca)
• I remember Ferrino’s strategy on hiring Reinhold Messner to improve their products or design brand new ones. The shift has been that all the reinhold messners of the world can do the same at really low costs: Ferrino is based in Italy, so snailmail writing or visiting might not be that comfortable. Of course, you need someone listening on the other side

Readings

More info

• InnoCentive
• Wikipedia (A), Harvard Business School Case on the Wikipedia (under a GNU Free Documentation License

Student research seminar: Ismael Peña-López

The goal of this research is to add reflection and knowledge to the belief that there is an important lack of tools to measure the development of the Information Society, specially addressed to policy makers aiming to foster digital development. We believe there is still an unexplored point of view in measuring the Information Society which goes from inside-out instead of outside-in. In other words, the main indices and/or reports focus either in technology penetration or in the general snapshot of the Information Society “as is”. There is, notwithstanding, a third approach that would deal with working only with digital-related indicators and indices, thus including some aspects not taken into account by the technology penetration approach (i.e. informational literacy), and putting aside some “real economy” or “analogue society” indicators not strictly related to the digital paradigm. Relationships between subindices would also provide interesting insight for policy makers on which to ground the design of their initiatives.

Michael Best comments that it’ll be interesting to test too the impact of the indices that measure the information society on policy makers and the policies they make up to foster the information society. I guess that maybe the way to do this would be to compare the series of an e-readiness indicator and the series of regulations issued during the same period of time in a country.

More info

• Working bibliography
• Slides for the Presentation