TY - JOUR T1 - Core-periphery communication and the success of free/libre open source software projects JF - Journal of Internet Services and Applications Y1 - 2017 A1 - Kevin Crowston A1 - Shamshurin, Ivan KW - Apache Software Foundation KW - communication KW - core and periphery KW - free/libre open source software (FLOSS) KW - inclusive pronouns KW - natural language processing KW - project success AB - We examine the relationship between communications by core and peripheral members and Free/Libre Open Source Software project success. The study uses data from 74 projects in the Apache Software Foundation Incubator. We conceptualize project success in terms of success building a community, as assessed by graduation from the Incubator. We compare successful and unsuccessful projects on volume of communication and on use of inclusive pronouns as an indication of efforts to create intimacy among team members. An innovation of the paper is that use of inclusive pronouns is measured using natural language processing techniques. We also compare the volume and content of communication produced by core (committer) and peripheral members and by those peripheral members who are later elected to be core members. We find that volume of communication is related to project success but use of inclusive pronouns does not distinguish successful projects. Core members exhibit more contribution and use of inclusive pronouns than peripheral members. VL - 8 UR - http://rdcu.be/uguP IS - 10 ER - TY - JOUR T1 - Roles and politeness behavior in community-based Free/Libre Open Source Software development JF - Information and Management Y1 - 2017 A1 - Kangning Wei A1 - Kevin Crowston A1 - Eseryel, U. Yeliz A1 - Heckman, Robert KW - Core-periphery structure KW - Open source software development KW - Politeness behavior AB - Community-based Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) development relies on contributions from both core and peripheral members. Prior research on core-periphery has focused on software coding-related behaviors. We study how core-periphery roles are related to social-relational behavior in terms of politeness behavior. Data from two FLOSS projects suggest that both core and peripheral members use more positive politeness strategies than negative strategies. Further, core and peripheral members use different strategies to protect positive face in positive politeness, which we term respect and intimacy respectively. Our results contribute to FLOSS research and politeness theory. VL - 54 IS - 5 ER - TY - CONF T1 - Boundary-spanning documents in online communities (Research-in-Progress) T2 - International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS) Y1 - 2011 A1 - Carsten Østerlund A1 - Kevin Crowston KW - boundary objects KW - Documents KW - Genre KW - Online communities KW - provenance AB - Online communities bring together people with varied access to and understanding of the work at hand, who must collaborate through documents of various kinds. We develop a framework articulating the characteristics of documents supporting collaborators with asymmetric access to knowledge versus those with symmetric knowledge. Drawing on theories about document genre, boundary objects and provenance, we hypothesize that documents supporting asymmetric groups are likely to articulate or prescribe their own 1) purpose, 2) context of use and 3) content and form and 4) provenance in greater detail than documents used by people with symmetric access to knowledge. We are testing these hypotheses through content analysis of documents and instructions from a variety of free/libre open source projects. We present preliminary findings consistent with the hypotheses developed. The completed study will suggest new directions for research on communications in online communities, as well as advice for those supporting such communities. JF - International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS) CY - Shanghai, China ER - TY - CONF T1 - Gaming for (citizen) science: Exploring motivation and data quality in the context of crowdsourced science through the design and evaluation of a social-computational system T2 - “Computing for Citizen Science” workshop at the IEEE eScience Conference Y1 - 2011 A1 - Nathan Prestopnik A1 - Kevin Crowston KW - Citizen Science KW - data quality KW - Design KW - Design Science KW - Games KW - Gaming KW - Motivation KW - Participation KW - Social Computational Systems AB - In this paper, an ongoing design research project is described. Citizen Sort, currently under development, is a web-based social-computational system designed to support a citizen science task, the taxonomic classification of various insect, animal, and plant species. In addition to supporting this natural science objective, the Citizen Sort platform will also support information science research goals on the nature of motivation for social-computation and citizen science. In particular, this research program addresses the use of games to motivate participation in social-computational citizen science, and explores the effects of system design on motivation and data quality. A design science approach, where IT artifacts are developed to solve problems and answer research questions is described. Research questions, progress on Citizen Sort planning and implementation, and key challenges are discussed. JF - “Computing for Citizen Science” workshop at the IEEE eScience Conference CY - Stockholm, Sweden UR - http://itee.uq.edu.au/~eresearch/workshops/compcitsci2011/index.html ER - TY - Generic T1 - Depicting What Really Matters: Using Episodes to Study Latent Phenomenon T2 - Proceedings of the International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS) Y1 - 2008 A1 - Annabi, Hala A1 - Kevin Crowston A1 - Heckman, Robert KW - Learning KW - Process AB - Research on processes and practices around information systems is often best conducted in naturalistic setting. To conduct valid and reliable research in such settings, researchers must find ways to reliably bound the phenomenon in which they are interested. In this paper we propose that researchers use episodes—events or processes occurring over a specified period of time—to isolate that which interests them from the vast set of related human behavior. The paper discusses the nature of episodes in the literature and suggests particular research settings in which episodes can be useful. The paper describes a three stage methodology to identify episodes for systematic data collection and analysis. The paper presents an example study using episodes to study group learning process in distributed groups. JF - Proceedings of the International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS) ER - TY - BOOK T1 - Organizing Business Knowledge: The MIT Process Handbook Y1 - 2003 A1 - Malone, Thomas W. A1 - Kevin Crowston A1 - Herman, George KW - Process PB - MIT Press CY - Cambridge, MA SN - 978-0-262-13429-3 ER - TY - Generic T1 - Process as theory in information systems research T2 - Proceedings of the IFIP TC8 WG8. 2 International Working Conference on the Social and Organizational Perspective on Research and Practice in Information Technology Y1 - 2000 A1 - Kevin Crowston KW - Process AB -

Many researchers have searched for evidence of organizational improvements from the huge sums invested in ICT. Unfortunately, evidence for such a pay back is spotty at best (e.g., Brynjolfsson 1994; Brynjolfsson and Hitt 1998; Meyer and Gupta 1994). On the other hand, at the individual level, computing and communication technologies are increasingly merging into work in ways that make it impossible to separate the two (e.g., Bridges 1995; Gasser 1986; Zuboff 198). This problem—usually referred to as the productivity paradox—is an example of a more pervasive issue: linking phenomena and theories from different levels of analysis. Organizational processes provide a bridge between individual, organizational, and even industrial level impacts of information and communication technologies (ICT). Viewing a process as the way organizations accomplish desired goals and transform inputs into outputs makes the link to organizational outcomes. Viewing processes as ordered collections of activities makes the link to individual work, since individual actors perform these activities. As well, process theories can be a useful milieu for theoretical interplay between interpretive and positivist research paradigms. A process-centered research framework is illustrated with an analysis of the process of seating and serving customers in two restaurants. The analysis illustrates how changes in individual work affect the process and thus the organizational outcomes and how processes provide a theoretical bridge between work at different levels of analysis.

JF - Proceedings of the IFIP TC8 WG8. 2 International Working Conference on the Social and Organizational Perspective on Research and Practice in Information Technology PB - Kluwer Academic Publishers CY - Aalborg, Denmark, 9–11 June N1 -

Reprinted in Malone, T. W., Crowston, K. & Herman, G. (Eds.) Organizing Business Knowledge: The MIT Process Handbook (pp. 177–190). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003.

ER - TY - JOUR T1 - Tools for inventing organizations: Toward a handbook of organizational processes JF - Management Science Y1 - 1999 A1 - Malone, Thomas W. A1 - Kevin Crowston A1 - Lee, Jintae A1 - Pentland, Brian A1 - Dellarocas, Chrysanthos A1 - Wyner, George A1 - Quimby, John A1 - Osborn, Charley A1 - Bernstein, Avi A1 - Herman, George A1 - Klein, Mark A1 - O'Donnell, Elissa KW - Coordination KW - Handbook KW - Process AB - This paper describes a novel theoretical and empirical approach to tasks such as business process redesign and knowledge management. The project involves collecting examples of how different organizations perform similar processes, and organizing these examples in an on-line "process handbook." The handbook is intended to help people: (1) redesign existing organizational processes, (2) invent new organizational processes (especially ones that take advantage of information technology), and (3) share ideas about organizational practices. A key element of the work is an approach to analyzing processes at various levels of abstraction, thus capturing both the details of specific processes as well as the "deep structure" of their similarities. This approach uses ideas from computer science about inheritance and from coordination theory about managing dependencies. A primary advantage of the approach is that it allows people to explicitly represent the similarities (and differences) among related processes and to easily find or generate sensible alternatives for how a given process could be performed. In addition to describing this new approach, the work reported here demonstrates the basic technical feasibility of these ideas and gives one example of their use in a field study. VL - 45 IS - 3 N1 - Reprinted in Malone, T. W., Crowston, K. & Herman, G. (Eds.) Organizing Business Knowledge: The MIT Process Handbook. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003. Reprinted in Malone, T. W., Laubacher, R. & Scott Morton, M. S. (Eds.). Inventing the Organizations of the 21st Century. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003. ER - TY - CONF T1 - Using a Process Handbook to design organizational processes T2 - Computational Organization Design: 1994 AAAI Spring Symposium Y1 - 1994 A1 - Dellarocas, C A1 - Lee, Jintae A1 - Malone, Thomas W. A1 - Kevin Crowston A1 - Pentland, Brian ED - Hulthage, Ingemar KW - Handbook KW - Process JF - Computational Organization Design: 1994 AAAI Spring Symposium PB - AAAI Press SN - 9780929280806 N1 - Technical Report SS-94-07 ER - TY - THES T1 - Towards a Coordination Cookbook: Recipes for Multi-Agent Action Y1 - 1991 A1 - Kevin Crowston KW - Coordination KW - Process AB - This thesis presents the first steps towards a theory of coordination in the form of what I call a coordination cookbook. My goal in this research is hypothesis generation rather than hypothesis testing: I attempt to develop a theory of coordination grounded in detailed empirical observation. I am especially interested in using this theory to identify ways of coordinating that may become more desirable when information technology is used to perform some of the coordination. I address the following question: how can we represent what people do to coordinate their actions when they work together on common goals, in a way that reveals alternative approaches to achieving those goals? To answer this question, I study groups of people making engineering changes to complex products as an example of a coordination-intensive task. I perform detailed case studies of the change process in three organizations: an automobile manufacturer, a commercial aircraft manufacturer and a computer system software developer. To analyze these cases, I develop a technique for describing the behaviour of the members of an organization, based on research in distributed artificial intelligence (DAI). I first develop a data-flow model of the change process to identify what information was used and how it was processed by the different members of the organization. Then, using ideas from DAI, I model what each individual must have known about the task and the rest of the organization to act as observed. To develop a theory of coordination, I generalize from these specific individuals to the kinds of tasks they performed. I develop a typology of interdependencies between organizational tasks and objects in the world (including resources and products). This typology includes four categories of coordination needs, due to interdependencies between: (1) different tasks, (2) tasks and subtasks, (3) tasks and objects in the world and (4) different objects. I then re-examine the cases to identify the coordination methods used to address these needs. (These coordination methods are similar in spirit to the weak problem solving methods of cognitive science.) I represent each method by a set of what I call coordination recipes that identify the goals, capabilities and knowledge of the individuals involved. In some cases, consideration of the possible distributions of these elements suggests approaches other than those actually observed. This framework allows an analyst to abstract from a description of how a particular organization performs a task to a description of the coordination needs of that task and a set of alternative coordination methods that could be used to address those needs. The results of my thesis should be useful in several ways. A better understanding of how individuals work together may provide a more principled approach for designing new computer applications, for analyzing the way organizations are currently coordinated and for explaining perceived problems with existing approaches to coordination. By systematically exploring the space of possible coordination strategies, we may be able to discover new kinds of organizations—organizations in which humans and computers work together in as yet unimagined ways. PB - MIT Sloan School of Management ER -