Open Source Biography: A review of the Open Source Software literature

Open Source Biography: A review of the Open Source Software literature

Date 26/05/2014 FP7-288021 – ©The EINS Consortium

ICT - Information and Communication Technologies

Open Source Biography: A review of the

Open Source Software literature

Due Date of Deliverable: 1st of May 2014

Actual Submission Date: 26/05/2014

Revision: Draft

Start date of project: April 1st 2014 Duration: 12 months

Organization name of lead contractor for this deliverable:

Editor: Nathalie Mitev

FP7-288021

Network of Excellence in Internet Science

OPEN CALL PROJECT: Disruptive ideas for an Internet Science



Authors: Wifak Gueddana; Nathalie Mitev

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Cross-disciplinary Participation in Open Source Communities

CPiOSC

01/04/2014

12 months

288021

THEME ICT-2011.1.1: Future Networks

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Open Source Biography: A review of the Open Source

Software literature

Conceptual Framework

D1 (Identifying concepts and Building theory)

01/05/2014

26/05/2014

Nathalie Mitev

Wifak Gueddana; Nathalie Mitev

1

Conceptual Framework

n/a

EINS Network

12/05/2014

26/05/2014

Final

37

Submitted – Under Review



TABLE OF CONTENTS

1 EXECUTIVE SUMMARY ................................................................................................................ 4

2 INTRODUCTION............................................................................................................................. 5

3 OS: PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE ........................................................................................... 7

3.1 A BRIEF OVERVIEW OF THE LITERATURE ............................................................................................ 7

3.2 OPEN SOURCE PARTICIPATION AND PLATFORMS ........................................................................... 10

3.3 RESEARCH QUESTIONS AND APPROACH ........................................................................................... 12

4 THE OPEN SOURCE BIOGRAPHY .......................................................................................... 14

4.1 BIOGRAPHY: A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE CONCEPT ............................................................................ 14

4.2 SOFTWARE BIOGRAPHY ....................................................................................................................... 17

4.3 OS BIOGRAPHY: AN EXTENSION OF THE BIOGRAPHY CONCEPT ................................................... 18

4.4 ASPECTS INTO THE OS BIOGRAPHY ................................................................................................... 21

4.4.1 Community Participation ................................................................................................................. 21

4.4.2 Learning ................................................................................................................................................... 22

4.4.3 OS Platform ............................................................................................................................................. 23

5 CONCLUSIONS ............................................................................................................................. 26

REFERENCES ........................................................................................................................................ 28

ANNEXES ............................................................................................................................................... 36

5.1 ANNEX I ................................................................................................................................................ 36

5.2 ANNEX II ............................................................................................................................................... 37



1 Executive Summary

Open Source (OS) communities behave differently from other technical

groups in their practices, goals, capacity utilisation and innovative outputs. This

research addresses the transformational impact of cross-boundary participation

online on these aspects of community building in open code development and

highlights the basis of a methodology that can be used to study online

collaboration and communities’ participation in distributed collective action. In

this document, we shall particularly review the Open Source Software literature

and introduce the concept of open source biography (OSB). The objective of this

document is to pinpoint gaps in the way OS has been approached when studying

the social dynamic of members’ participation online, which could eventually

lead scholars to a significant epistemological bias in the way OS communities

are understood and conceptualised. This document argues that the concept of

OSB introduces a time and narrative dimensions that are crucial to

understanding the stakes on the sustainability of OS communities and the

characterising of the social and the technical environments associated with open

code (throughout design, use and long-term maintenance). We shall start by

introducing the OS literature, then framing this research’s questions. In the third

section, we present the notion of biography and how it can be applied to

software and OS particularly.



2 Introduction

In the current post-crisis climate, the urge to adopt new tools that transform businesses

and spark new sustainable models of wealth creation including civil society, socially-driven

organizations and individuals is higher than ever. A lot is expected in this regard from

information technologies (exp.: mobile, cloud, social media) just as their role in the economy

is booming – reinforcing the existence of a ubiquitous digital infrastructure flowing through

millions of interconnected devices and daily clicks worldwide. Whilst our societies and

cultural practices are gradually but steadily translated into different types of digital artefacts,

the open source (OS) paradigm is recast under a new light. How does it fit-in the dynamic of

the current digital industry? What are the main dimensions characterising OS production and

use? And can it create an alternative code production model that is more sustainable and

community-based?

In this research, we shall document through a unique case study exemplar the long-term

development of OS over design, use and maintenance cycles. Our aim is to open a debate

about methods for studying distributed communities and coordinated action online, as it is the

case for the production and long-term use of OS. Particularly, we shall contribute to the OS

scholarship by answering how in the context of heterogeneous OS communities, including

software professionals, NGOs, and individuals, the long-term development of OS code differ

from mainstream in the kind, extent, and most interestingly the social dynamic aspects of

users’ participation and innovation. Whereas a vast majority of OS studies have written

substantially about OS communities where developers design and use their own code, we

pinpoint the need to explore how communities including lay users and members with

interactional expertise can potentially leverage OS software and its platform.

In the later stages of this research (throughout the next deliverables), we shall

concentrate our attention on methodology, suggesting a holistic research design spanning

organisational boundaries and looking at patterns of information exchanges across distributed

members in an OS community. In line with a major EINS topic, ‘real time analysis of

discussions in online communities’, we will keep our focus on micro-level interactions and

members’ logs of activity in order to get to explaining collective behaviour and OS

development over time. We will also use and document an empirical study to show how to

chart information flows across community groups and individuals in order to explore



socialisation mechanisms and aspects of users’ engagement with code and collective

negotiation over time.

In this document in particular, we review the Open Source Software literature and

introduce the concept of open source biography (OSB). The objective of this document is to

pinpoint gaps in the way OS has been approached when studying the social dynamic of

members’ participation online, which could eventually lead scholars to a significant

epistemological bias in the way OS communities are understood and conceptualised. This first

document argues that the concept of OSB introduces a time and narrative dimensions that are

crucial to understanding the stakes on the sustainability of OS communities and the

characterising of the social and the technical environments associated with open code long-

term development (throughout design, use and maintenance). We shall start in the next section

by introducing the OS literature, then the framing of the research questions. In the fourth

section, we present the notion of biography and how it can be applied to software and OS

particularly.



3 OS: Past, Present and Future

3.1 A brief Overview of the Literature

In a nutshell, OS swings between those who believe it is a revolutionary paradigm and

those who argue that there is nothing new (Lindman 2011). While remaining highly

controversial as to their benefits, openness and performance, OS projects have though

increased in frequency over the past decades, especially among government agents and civil

society (Ibid). Many software scholars have also continued to show interest; they studied OS

code, projects and performance, but they focused their attention mainly on the developers, i.e.

their activities, profile, contribution, and systems of governance. Overall, they have largely

contributed to reinforcing in our minds an imagery of a homogeneous and cohesive

community of software ‘gigs’, also called hackers, who volunteer their time to produce and

release OS code while they have personal motives and most of them seek long-term or

indirect rewards (Lerner & Tirole 2000; Ye & Kishida 2003; Lakhani & Wolf 2005; Ghosh

2005; Nov & Kuk 2008).

With regard to methodologies, OS scholars have walked both the quantitative and the

qualitative paths of inquiry – as it is often the case in the social sciences. Many among the

quantitative papers have examined OS code characteristics and the dynamics of OS code

releases and bug fixes. Typically, those start by identifying for their research field, major

software versioning and revision control systems (also called SVN repositories) such as,

github.com or sourceforge.net. Then, they turn their attention to the hundreds of lines of OS

projects, their different attributes and indicators of activity and performance (see Succi et al.

2001, Godfrey and Tu 2000; 2001, Robles and al. 2005, Scacchi 2003, Mockus et al. 2002).

To collect and analyse the data displayed in the public code repositories, they develop scripts

to crawl, scrape pages and re-order their content. Based on that, they can model code

performance and evolution by mining frequencies and variations between releases, uploads,

fixes, etc. (see Godfrey and Tu 2000; 2001; Succi et al. 2001; Mockus et al. 2002; Crowston

and Scozzi 2002; Scacchi 2003, 20; Jensen and Scacchi 2004; Paulson et al. 2004; Robles et

al. 2005; Koch 2007).



Most of these studies are concerned with measurements, or the identification of

variables that affect code evolution, performance, activity, etc. (Ibid). They rely implicitly on

known theories of software design to highlight if OS code features characteristics that are

mainly unique. From this perspective, OS quantitative studies look like an instance of data

analytics with huge repositories of data and a heavy reliance on sometimes complicated

computational analytics, which might be hard to comprehend and validate by people with a

lesser technical background. The OS ontology is also amalgamated within variations between

code lines/attributes/variables; whereas important differences among OS projects, the social

dynamic of their sub-community members and their development practices continue to prevail

unnoticed. These do shape though the future of OS projects (their activity/continuity), as well

as the software industry indirectly. While quantitative and computational analytics are

important for establishing general patterns of behaviour among OS code population, they still

tell us little about what makes OS communities distinct and if they ever are.

In contrast, qualitative studies of OS typically provide thick narratives and describe in

rich details projects’ idiosyncrasies, highlighting aspects of power relation among

stakeholders which may affect the organisation of one particular OS community and the

future of its code releases, their spread and use. Looking at these studies, it becomes clear that

OS is not one community of software gigs but hundreds of voices, divisions and interest

groups. Indeed, a stream of well-known OS scholars have provided through the case study

and comparative case studies approaches an alternative strategy, which so far has moved the

ongoing debate beyond OS code measurements. They documented in an ethnographic-like

style a wealth of material and interview data about the organising and governance of mature

OS projects, which has shed light on intra-group dynamics among developers, their power

struggles and company alliances (Mockus et al. Herbsleb 2000; Raymond 2001; Tuomi 2001;

Mockus et al. 2005; Lanzara 2005; Rosenberg 2008).

Yet, the major exemplars of these studies are contained within projects where the

developers are themselves the users of their code, such as the Linux operating system, the

Freenet file sharing network, the Debian project, the Apache server, or Mozilla (Mockus et

al. 2000; Mockus et al. 2005; Von Krogh et al. 2003; Scacchi 2002; Sowe et al. 2008; Spaeth

et al. 2008). Therefore they ended up, similarly to the quantitative studies, amplifying the

ethos of software design and code tinkering, as well as concentrating on the practices of the

developers alone.



For instance, it was argued that in most OS projects, active members among the

developers are less than 20%. The remaining 80% which contain other contributors among

non-developers were deemed peripheral (Kuk 2006; Fitzgerald 2005; Krishnamurthy 2002);

whereas presumably peripheral participants cover the greater bulk of OS development

activities across use, maintenance, and upgrades as well as through long time periods.

Examples of peripheral activities include testing, documentation, features’ translation, bugs’

reporting, posting, new requirement specification, localisation, and yet many others that do

not directly involve uploading code commits (Jørgensen 2001; Moon & Sproull 2002;

Lakhani & Von Hippel 2003).

Although interesting and insightful, we can actually criticize such studies for creating a

sense of insularity, recasting OS meaning through the discourse and inward practices of a few

isolated software ‘gigs’. This bias, we argue, is again, one of method – not necessarily

quantitative or qualitative. It is caused by an approach to OS that takes for granted onset that

software and developers are the sole active dimensions worth exploring. So the research field

selected, which is also the investigation proxy, is more often than not confused with SVN

repositories in both qualitative and quantitative studies. Because of their common appeal

among developers, such code repositories attract OS scholars, who are thus brought to

conflate OS socialisation practices and the systems of affordances in SVN repositories –

which are designed per default for committing code and fixing bugs.

In fact, OS communities are platform-centric arrangements enabling distributed code

development through participants’ engagement with web 2.0 technologies and mobile apps.

Particularly, SVN repositories are only one component of wider platforms, spanning multiple

sites and interconnected pages; these may include projects’ web pages, software versioning

and revision control systems tools, mailing lists, chat rooms, blogs, wikis, translation sites and

other data repositories. By only focusing on code repositories, a researcher may overlook the

important social drive that is explicit in other pages, as in email repositories or chat rooms

which are necessary tools for coordinating distributed action, as well as may well reflect the

various aspects of communal activities online and offline.



3.2 Open Source Participation and Platforms

Undoubtedly, the case of OS is a testimony that platform features are powerful in

shaping our understanding of coordinated action online, as they are performative; they affect

how we approach our study and what we seek to look for in the first place. Therefore, we

would like in this document to emphasise the importance of OS platforms, how we study

them and associate their internal dynamics to the development of communities. In the next

section, we will explain how the concept of the OS biography in particular accommodates the

study of OS platforms and integrate it in a staged and holistic methodology. But before

moving on, we will show in the remaining of this section, that platforms impact our

understanding of OS, not only because they delimit the scope of our investigation, but more

importantly, because they define long-term membership and characterise members’

engagement with OS code and its platform features.

Most OS scholars see participation as an act of mobilisation1. Similarly to Resource

Mobilisation Theory (RMT) (McCarthy & Zald 1977) members’ involvement with OS is

described as individual utility and incentive selection (Lerner & Tirole 2000; Ye & Kishida

2003; Lakhani & Wolf 2005; Ghosh 2005; Nov & Kuk 2008). RMT exposes what kind of

cost-reducing mechanisms and career benefits justify why few individuals “on their own”

bear the cost of collective action (Olson 1965) – which idea is also echoed among OS scholars

(Raymond 2001; Benkler 2003; Von Krogh et al. 2003; Coleman 2004; Garzarelli et al. 2008;

Spaeth et al. 2008; O’Mahony & Bechky 2008; Oost et al. 2009; Söderberg 2011; Mansell

2012). RMT is value-driven. It focuses our attention on the grievance and shared beliefs of

oppressed actors who are emotionally brought to act collectively. Similarly, OS scholars have

emphasised the values of Free Speech and Openness, which it was argued can motivate

developers to volunteer time, being an inspiration for the OS movement and software activists

such as Stallman (Stallman et al. 2002; Raymond 2001; Coleman & Golub 2008).

1 Developers contribute in OSS to improve their career prospects and acquire reputation (Lerner & Tirole

2000; Lerner & Tirole 2002; Lerner & Tirole 2005; Ghosh 2005). Spaeth et al. (2008) also argue that it is

necessary that someone or organisation bears the cost of participants' incentives in order to solve the dilemma of

collective action (Spaeth et al. 2008). Underlying, OS code is a common good. This must be sustained by

accounting for a measurable probability that members will refrain from contributing, waiting for someone else to

do so instead (Olson 1965).



However, mobilisation explained by individual utility and personal motives – as RMT

contends - is just one dimension of more durable, socially embedded and shifting practices of

engagement with OS platforms and intra-community interactions. If we are to equate OS

communities’ participation and mobilisation, we risk displacing the emphasis on the

momentum that is when participants join an OS community, as when they are registered in its

mailing lists, account pages, etc. Such proxies of participation are measurable, hence

appealing for scholars. However they lead us to think of participation in terms of discrete,

single contributions; rather than layers of sociality and longitudinal processes of engagement

with platform features, which naturally prompt cycles of interactions and organic

technological changes – given that technology and community dynamics co-produce each

other. (Gasser et al. 2003; Ducheneaut 2005; Iannacci 2005; Sack et al. 2006; Pattison et al.

2008; Fang and Neufeld 2009; Iivari 2009).

Participation in OS is indeed multiple, idiosyncratic and often uneven. First, OS

communities are heterogeneous; they include different profiles and expertise, as well as

various interest groups among lay users (Kollock 1999; Von Hippel 2005; Chesbrough et al.

2006; Bollier 2008; Benkler 2006; Benkler and Nissenbaum 2006; Maxwell 2006) and

members with interactional expertise2 (Collins & Evans 2002). Such actors are necessary to

the code production itself. They assume an important role in maintaining a critical and

incremental social dynamic through bug reporting, the seeking of answers/help, problem

solving practices, and all sorts of interactions and activities that ground code design into daily

use (Garud et al. 2008). Second, participation is deemed a largely ‘unknown workforce’

(Ågerfalk and Fitzgerald 2008) as project owners and administrators do not possess all the

knowledge and resources needed to produce and sustain code development. It is also difficult

to say if participants will do what is required.

For all these reasons, participation depends on the sustaining of complementary

expertise as well, as enacting a constant interactive order (Goffman 1983). Through

interactions, participants acquire enough quantity of ‘unknown-to-them’ expertise in order to

contribute to code production, maintenance and upgrades. By so doing, they generate local

2 The notion of interactional expertise applies well to OS in the extent that there are at least two bodies of

knowledge involved in code production (Mackenzie 2006).



information exchanges and sustain a stream of comments, code commits, solutions, etc. (Braa

et al. 2004; Shaikh & Cornford 2009). The very fact that community members develop

capabilities to sustain their interactions means that there is something in the nature of software

knowledge that can be transferred and acquired (Mau and Leonard 2004, 11). Therefore

interactions and online engagement practices are conditioned by the development of OS

platforms, if they will reveal to be in the long run a knowledge-productive environment for

the whole.

Mature OS platforms have thus become a rich repository for members’ generated

content. In addition to code commits, research has showed that they include all sorts of

resources, which are stored and interlinked across sites, social media pages and data

repositories (see Annex I). Such distributed, but hyper-linked chains of information become

activated and perform as one synchronised device once members click on posts, comments,

and links enabling interaction with other members and sites features. By so doing they enable

OS platforms to act as a global digital asset, which order, organise and measure collaboration,

as well as is involved in OS co-production processes (Von Hippel 2005). OS platforms

provide therefore an associated milieu (Simondon 1980); they are material and can be made

durable and knowledge productive. OS platforms are also important to study to understand

how they can foster members’ interactions and lead members to develop knowledge

mechanisms and learning processes.

3.3 Research Questions and Approach

Following on the above, we argue that OS communities are best understood in-the-

making, as practices of participation and knowledge negotiation processes over time (Gasser

et al. 2003; Ducheneaut 2005; Fang & Neufeld 2009). To capture the unfolding character of

members’ interactions, we argue in particular that OS are better represented as biographies.

This concept offers researcher a micro-perspective that allows exploring the gradual unfolding

of group dynamics, members’ relations and communication practices. How these are mediated

by OS platforms and web 2.0 technologies, and how people interact, exchange information

and build individual and collective capabilities over time.



Before moving into the final section of this conceptual document, we would like to

remind the reader that the purpose of this research is foremost methodological. Above all, we

seek to design a methodology that follows the medium (OS platforms) in order to examine

how individuals interact, build capabilities and sustain the development of an OS community.

This methodology is a twofold hybrid; first it takes the technology (OS platform) as a starting

point instead of aligning initially with the social actors or OS software products. Second it

uses a mix of methods, starting with network graph visualisations, while contextualising the

outputs in a case study narrative.

From this perspective, the hybrid methodology challenges how ‘place’ is practiced in

scientific research. It does not address OS platforms as ‘taken for granted’ research proxies

through which we can observe users’ digital footprints; instead it allows us to describe OS in-

the-making, as extensible fields of relations (Hastrup and Olwig 1997: 8) that are being

continuously redefined. By so doing, this methodology draws away from ‘holism’, moving

towards “connectivity” or relationism as an “organizing principle” (Hine 2000, p.60).



4 The Open Source Biography

In the rest of this document we will introduce and explain the concept of biography and

how it frames our methodology and thinking. This is a major underpinning of our research as

we think biographies are particularly suited to capture “connectivity” or relationism in OS

long-term development and online communities’ development more generally. Next, we will

start by mapping the evolution of this concept from the history of technology, to cultural

studies, to software and open source software. Then we will demonstrate how biographies are

essentially unfolding and constructive to the extent that they allow us to explore actual

phenomena by tracing related trajectories of change over the past, present and future. Finally,

we shall re-visit the biography concept which we will use to conceptualise the ontology of the

OS long-term development, and emphasise the emergent, shifting and constructive nature of

this social process.

4.1 Biography: a Brief history of the concept

Often biographies are used to describe the long-term performance of subjects, i.e. their

‘time line’ or the story of how they experience events in order to become what they are now.

Sometimes the biographical method also overlaps with history, as the latter attempts to revive

the past, by showing how it is mingling into our current being. Biographies are not limited to

human subjects though. They were used to reconstitute the history of craftsmanship and

technological innovations such as electricity, the spacecraft, Internet, etc. Many among these

studies were criticized for restricting technological change to a phenomenon internal to the

technical realm – which amounts to technological determinism3 (Mitcham 1994, p.114).

Indeed, some historians have documented long chronological series where they represented

technologies (features/tools) as inherently beneficial, having progressively evolved for the

betterment of humanity. They hence seemed to echo the retherotic of supply and its promises

of social change, somewhat oblivious to historical contingency and arbitrary decisions

(Winner, p.14).

3 Technological determinism refers to a common belief that technology is a kind of univocal determining

force with a momentum and highly predicable outcomes, be they positive or negative (Bijker 2001, 26; Winner

2001, 12).



To overcome such a bias, cultural Studies and Studies of Technology and Science (STS)

have tried to re-invent this concept. They called for culturally embedded methods to account

for the social in technical change and how the latter recursively affects individuals and

society. Through anthropology (Mauss. 1924, 1954; Appadurai, 1986; Kopytoff 1986),

archaeology (Gosden & Marshall 1999; Holtorf 2002; Schiffer & Miller 1999, p.22; Shanks

1998; Tilley 1996, p.316), and sociology (Callon & Latour 1981; Hughes 1983; Strum &

Latour 1987; Pinch & Bijker 1987; Latour 1988; Mol & Law 1994; MacKenzie & Wajcman

1999; Collins & Yearly 1992; Law 1991; Pickering 1992; Bijker 2001; Sismondo 2007; Law

2002; Waltz 2004; MacKenzie 2005; MacKenzie 2006; Pickering 2011) renowned scholars

have coined the terms, ‘biography’, ‘biography of things’, or/and ‘biography of objects’,

which concepts have described how people sometimes take on the attributes of things and

sometimes things act like people, showing the recursive relation between human agency,

social meaning, and material attributes (Kopytoff 1986).

Particularly, Kopytoff (1986) has demonstrated how the concept of biography can

outstrip the process of technological commodification from an inherent determinism, and

reveal a complex individuation process that shapes the becoming of objects and technologies

while they continue to circulate in global markets, are traded and exchanged. He argues that

economics regulates the production of commodities, by giving them an exchange value which

organises their worth and affordance (Kopytoff 1986, p.64). This value is commonly equated

with an economic valuation of sub-components and design features. Whereas

commodification is crucial to technological development, Kopytoff (1986) draws an

interesting analogy between this process and enslavement (pp.64-65).

Assuming a commonsensical definition of slavery that is “the treatment of a person as a

property” (pp. 65), he argues that technologies are enslaved when treated like commodities

(Ibid). He then shows that when an individual is enslaved (stripped from her initial identity),

she is by the same token reinserted into a new host 'milieu' where she acquires a new

identity/role. By so doing, she also survives, continuing to interact with her environment and

building new relations that may lead her eventually to freedom. Similarly, a technology can

be re-individuated through use – that is when its design features are transformed into new

“configuration of relations” and emergent settings, enabling readjustment and change.



Therefore, commodification is not just about converting objects into inert properties.

Studying their biography would tell us instead how they were produced, used, exchanged and

have circulated between people and organisations, as social actors, succeeding to create their

own associated milieu (Simondon 1980), or failing to do so. From this perspective, the

concept of biography is generative; it does not stop at design features, or capital market

alienation by way of technological commodification. It reintegrates the economics of

commodities in the evolving meaning of objects, practices and uses, thus extending their

potential for individuation.

However a technology might not always be a viable object/product, as it will always

harbour a region of uncertainty (Simondon 1980; 1992; Combes 1999). According to

Simondon (1980) a technology remains what is needed to be explained – “rather than being

this that explains”. Therefore, its meaning is constructed retrospectively through the

biographical process, i.e. that is once a researcher tries to re-constitute what might or might

not be an individuated technology, by isolating the object of scrutiny from its relations to

other influences (Simondon 1992, p.300). This way, she leaves by the same token, a "pre-

individuated-left-over” i.e. a potential, making possible future individuations (Combes 1999,

pp.6-9); hence, it is the biographical process of individuation that brings the individuated

subject into being – whether this is complete or is yet to be individuated.

For all these reasons, biographies are primarily relational; they offer us a view of the

meta-structure (that is the technology, the product, the software) by revealing their underlying

practices, micro-histories, and the daily processes of participants’ interactions over past,

present and future. By so doing, they can explain how the whole assemblage is likely to be

productive and reveal the necessary social mechanisms for learning, knowledge negotiation

and technology change. Also biographies are a constructivist view of technology. They bring

us to see object as a long-term performance – rather than what they are in attribution. The

latter qualities start only to unfold when we connect together an object’s former, actual and

future manifestations: going from mere conceptual design, to a product of the network and the

agents who trade their influence and organise markets, and to a newer becoming shaped by

contexts of use and the uncertainty of technical progress.



4.2 Software Biography

More recently, the concept of biography was brought to the study of software (Pollock

et al. 2003; Pollock & Cornford 2004; Pollock et al. 2007; Lowe & Locke 2007; Pollock &

Williams 2009; Pollock & Williams 2010). In this regard, Pollock and Williams (2009) argue

that markets, design, and the socio-politics of software production and use are similarly

components of software ontology (Ibid). This has a spatiotemporal locus that “goes beyond

single momentums and spaces” (Pollock et al. 2003; Pollock & Williams 2009, p.59) and

must be investigated as a global performance where design and use span individuals and

organizational boundaries (Pollock & Williams 2009; 2010). The resulting challenge in terms

of research is to break the rules making researchers move between spheres that are supposed

to be insulated from each other – which the software biography promises to do.

Arguably, Pollock and Williams (2009) have admitted, through the notion of software

biography, that software code is incomplete by nature (Garud et al. 2008). This is because

code is inherently interactive (Wegner 1997): It operates through built-in relations established

by a set of variables and connectable objects, but it also interacts once running, with other

external objects that it cannot control (ibid). To endure, it must perform by building

continuously new meanings through associations with other functions, domains of utility and

use (ibid). When a particular software code is singled out in a particular moment in time, it

therefore features only partial specifications, unfinished scripts, and imperfect modes of use

(Wegner 1997; Gasser et al. 2003; Garud et al. 2008).

Through use and re-use software becomes better at delegation and coordination between

components and built-in algorithms (Mackenzie 2006). APIs and algorithms change4, as the

underlying code gradually spans the boundaries of software packages connecting to a larger

architecture of code, interfaces, and to a new web of semantics inscribed in code objects

(Pollock and Williams 2009, p.20). This way, software becomes the materialisation of a

thousand commits, data repositories and production platforms where individuated code items

continue over time to be transformed and mutate.

4 Lehman 1980; 1996 and Cook et al. 2006 show that code change is inevitable and that there are limits to

further adaptations in terms of safely implementing functionalities in a legacy system.



From this perspective, the software biography is about going beyond ‘the actual

artefact’ (Simondon 1992, p.300), showing instead software as what it is: a partially

captured’ (Simondon 1980), and so a ‘partially finished’ product (Pollock & Williams 2009,

p.59). Pollock and Williams have thus emphasised code trajectories – rather than a trajectory,

trying to bring researchers to investigate how a particular code may – or may not - interact

with other code objects, users and social domains and become a standard for the industry (see

Simon 1996; Fleck 1988; Wegner 1997; Jørgensen 2001; Gasser et al. 2003; Garud et al.

2008; Goldin and Wegner 2008). Accordingly, they write, a software solution does not stop at

the “initial research and development [stage], but [expands] ... through implementation to use

and continues over multiple products” (Pollock & Williams 2009, p.76). So "software

solutions only …become ‘alive’… when they operate” (Pollock & Williams 2009, p.12).

4.3 OS Biography: An extension of the Biography Concept

Pollock and Williams’ (2009; 2010) software biography has deep implications in the

way we understand software and digital change more generally. Scholarly, it also promises to

bridge the current cleavages in software literature by introducing a unified conceptual

underpinning for the social, economic and design views of software (Ibid). For these reasons

we were heavily inspired by it and we would like in this research to extend it particularly to

OS and the exploring of its code and community development over time. In fact, we think that

the biographical approach can naturally emphasise social phenomena which are de facto

undergoing continuous change and transformation and which can benefit from a relational and

constructivist view of technology to emphasise a generative (and innovative) potential.

The case of OS in particular fits this brief; the OS biography should thus allow us to

investigate how OS’s internal organisation and development are closely coupled within strong

cultural signifiers (OS communities) and an unfolding and emergent infrastructure (OS

platform) that both frames OS long-term development materially and operates it into action.

By so doing, it should reveal OS as a distributed ecosystem, where membership is transient

and renewable, depending on people, their action, and practices, as well as on the OS code

and platform’s capabilities to uphold interactions and change (Grinter et al. 1999; Herbsleb et

al. 2000).



So far, we have seen that the software biography is a holistic and constructivist view of

software. Particularly, Pollock and Williams (2003; 2010) and Pollock et al. (2007) have used

it to investigate the case of a global, but ‘closed’ Enterprise Resource Planning system (ERP),

namely the SAP University Campus Solution. In this case, we see that the code potential to be

transformed is limited by the organisational structure of an initial vendor-client relationship

that can grow but does not necessarily change organically – users may go up in number; yet

they remain dependent on a central group of vendors, contractors, and subcontractors who

will try to achieve economies of scale through downstream alignment (see Pollock et al. 2007;

Pollock and Williams 2010). The network is thus locked-in; but its solar structure of power

continues to expand and radiate influence5 (1n relation). Based on this case’s setting, the

authors have thus emphasised code generification that is the solidification/institutionalisation

of certain code features, which gradually are forced into a standard for the industry (Ibid).

In contrast, OS communities are naturally organic and changing, showing an ongoing

tension between internal structure, values, and future. First, OS scripts underpin the

functioning (operability) of an OS application. They also represent it as a cultural signifier,

which may elicit affirmative or negative identifications on the part of members: programmers,

users, companies, admins, etc. (Mackenzie 2006, p.71). Accordingly, both functionality and

cultural meaning are encompassed in the OS code and platform, which replace the formal

organisational rules in the coordination of complex activity systems (Lanzara 2005).

In addition, OS applications are merely actual once released, i.e. transient relations

made by a set of participants and the material objects connecting them (Mackenzie 2006,

p.70). They start to change with patches and new commits appearing every now and then,

while some of their features slowly and provisionally stabilise across releases (Mackenzie

2006, p.70). Such a dynamic construction exemplifies OS collective agency in the process of

constituting itself through an interactive mode of collective enactment and individuation

(differentiation) (Mackenzie 2006, p.70).

55 Josephine Berry (2002) argues that closing a source code narrows its potential adaptations and

condemns it to the stifling monotony of a fixed identity, altered by strictly controlled modifications and

upgrades. While it may still grow and nurture a greater number of users, it is an “illusion of innovation and

difference in a regime of unwavering homogeneity” (Berry 2002).



The Linux project is an example. Adrian Mackenzie (2006) argues that Linux is cultural

by virtue of the dual relations that run through it – Linux would not persist if it was not

sustainably embedded in the values of its community; at the same time, it shapes it (Pattison

et al. 2008). Indeed, the means of Linux production (Linux OS platform) and its code

contribute strongly to its cultural meaning (Mackenzie 2006, p.70). Appeared in 1991 as a

clone of UNIX, today Linux’s code files, documents and social archives are encompassed in a

worldwide platform, flowing through thousands of nodes – which hardly makes Linux a

unique trajectory. Indeed, there are as many Linux versions and applications as there are

cultural differences (Ibid). Each Linux app corresponds to a “material equilibrium” moving

'most-of-the-time’ in controlled variations (Toscano 2007, p.200), so that Linux can never be

finished. Instead of being a technology whose ontology is defined by inner attributes, Linux is

a vector opening onto a potential, which is both enacted by participation and organise it

(Coleman 2004; Fang and Neufeld 2009; Ducheneaut 2005).

In fact, in his book "the Open Source Paradigm Shift", Tim O’Reilly (2005) writes

about software code which is born "naturally” – both in and across organisational settings. He

argues that OS code is not a product in itself, but an infrastructure6. Once it attracts enough

attention, it becomes a commodity, serving as a stepping stone for innovation7 (Murdock

2005; O’Reilly 2005). A majority of OS software will not though experience the resounding

successes of certain OS projects, such as the Apache web server, the Mozilla browser, the

GNU C compiler, the PERL scripting language or the MySQL database management system

(Fitzgerald 2006). So knowing when an “itch is worth scratching” (Fitzgerald 2006) is also

important, and for that the OS biography in particular delivers a framework to investigate OS

code, platform, community participation and the potential thereof.

6 Once one OS code is released, both producer and competition make new niche markets by designing

added layers of APIs, modules, etc. to create commercial value. Through mimetic competition, participants

increase OS code’s network effect, eventually turning it into a standard (Von Hippel & Von Krogh 2003;

Fitzgerald 2006).

7 According to Tim O’Reilly, commodity is fungible, defined by uniform qualities which makes them

basic building blocks for various purposes (O’Reilly 2005).



4.4 Aspects into the OS Biography

Rather than software generification, we argue that the OS biography emphasises

participation and socialisation. The OS biography aims therefore to demonstrate how the dual

members-platform relationship sustain – or fail to sustain – community development in the

long run. In this final subsection, we shall characterise what the OS biography entails, as we

zoom into major ontological dimensions of OS and its associated milieu. First, we re-

introduce and explain in more details OS community participation, as that what the OS

biography should be set to examine and measure in the first place. This implies taking also

into consideration the nature of the OS code itself, as well as the constructive process of

learning (section 4.4.2) and OS platform design and management (section 4.4.3).

4.4.1 Community Participation

As we also have mentioned before, community participation in OS has suffered from a

restricted RMT view. The latter emphasis is primarily on individuals’ rational choice (Spaeth

et al. 2008; Söderberg 2011; Oost et al. 2009; Heckathorn 1993) – which shows little about

what makes an OS collective stick together if it ever does. Elster (1986) calls this the

deficiency of the economics of collective action. He argues that collective action ceases to be

a prisoner’s dilemma (a cost-benefit equation), once the act of participating is beneficial in

itself (Ibid p.132).

Following on that, we argue that there is more to OS than individuals’ motives. In fact,

OS participants, who can, but need not, exist within the boundaries of membership groups,

interact so as to provide information and a sense of sociability, support and belonging (Von

Hippel 2005, p.96). OS communities are thus emergent and their membership is transient.

Participation varies considerably in quality – reflecting uneven commitments and time

investments; yet members are also susceptible to create knowledge through interactions, as

socialisation and information sharing practices are incremental and transformative.

Particularly, information exchange enables local knowledge building and continuous

redesign (Gasser et al. 2003; Haefliger et al. 2008; Markus 2001). For instance, Lakhani &

Von Hippel (2003) show that 'answer persons' often acquire knowledge and learn when they

provide peer-support and interact with others to solve bugs or OS code problems. By so

doing, their role in the network goes beyond information diffusion; so they occupy more

socially complex and shifting positions where they are learners and teachers at the same time.



4.4.2 Learning

As we mentioned before, OS communities are heterogeneous, as they often include in

addition to admins and developers end-users and other people with interactional expertise,

who can take part directly or indirectly. Braa and others (2004) argue that this category of

participants are important because they represent complementary networks of knowledge8

which mediate the integration of code within a given domain of use (Braa et al. 2004). The

plurality of knowledge profiles necessary to code development is thus a sign of epistemic

richness in a community. Through socialisation and information exchange practices, members

can interweave a collective domain of knowledge. This fosters members’ exposure to new

practices and constructs, thus making the probability of individuals’ discovery of novel

insights more intense and focused (Haas 1992).

Learning and the processes through which it occurs are necessary mechanisms of

adaptation in conditions of ambiguity (March & Olsen 1975) – this is also the case for OS, as

it is a largely unknown workforce (Fitzgerald 2006). Through online socialisation, i.e., peer-

support, and problem solving conversations, community members negotiate a better

understanding of the subject matter (Jankowicz 1995; Palincsar and Brown 1984). Sometimes

even the dynamism of a social space overrides the utility of individuals, making them interact

more than expected (Lave & Wenger 2000). As they interact and share information, they

become each other’s students and contribute to each other's constructs and practices (Forman

& Fyfe 1998, p.239).

In this respect, Lave and Wenger (1991) suggest that learning involves the construction

of individuals’ identity and is in itself an evolved form of collective (Sack et al. 2006).

Experienced or not, an individual must first learn how to ascertain membership, by not only

‘showing off’ expertise, but by sustaining a role in the network (Ducheneaut 2005).

Participation exhibits thus a dual and even a paradoxical nature. On the one hand, participants

must accept the responsibility to learn (obey the collective); on the other, they must feel free

to teach (maintain the necessary authority to carry the consequences of their action (Sen

1992). These two elements are crucial for the sustainability of participation, acting as

switchers from a referential of knowledge to the other (Ibid).

8 (Yearley 1999; Bijker & Law 1992; Bijker 2001; Collins & Evans 2002; Sismondo 2007)



For example, OS mailing lists (ML) are a space where members expose their problems

and hope to get feedback. Newcomers are implicitly the apprentices of administrators who

answer their questions. Apprentices apply their capabilities to the tasks at hand, making

informed decisions with high degrees of autonomy; yet they are also ‘tutored’ by more

experienced members in an ongoing dialectic of post-exchanges and problem solving

processes (Ye & Kishida 2003). As learners, apprentices are able to contribute at learners’

levels and at the same time still produce knowledge that can be learnt by others (Lakhani &

Wolf 2005; Lakhani & Von Hippel 2003).

Therefore, the majority of MLs’ posters are information seekers – whether they have

experience or not. They require information so as to enable a form of inquisitive tinkering

(Coleman 2008, citing Levy 1984), which leads over time to the solving of more errors and

the improving of code design. Even when a participant only pinpoints bugs, absences, or

dysfunctions, she makes others understand the nature of a certain problem.

Thus, information seeking is not about subscribers consuming knowledge (free-riding),

in contrast to others who are giving it away. The act of sharing a question helps also shape its

object, which comes to saying that “knowledge is a synergetic process –you get more out than

you put in” (Sowe et al. 2008). Indeed knowledge sharing in collaborative environments

results in more knowledge overall (Lazonder et al 2003). Knowledge building and learning

are therefore a primary incentive for participants (Fang & Neufeld 2009), making OS code

and platform both a mean and an objective for participation (Spaeth et al. 2008) – insomuch

that this material assemblage must provide members with effective communication enablers

to perform their capabilities and learn.

4.4.3 OS Platform

Mapping the social dynamic of an OS community is one major task in an OS biography,

as actors’ background knowledge and organisational membership shape socialisation and the

collective in general (Emirbayer & Goodwin 1994). This is commonly referred to in network

scholarship and the social sciences, as "embeddedenss" (Barnes 1954; Granovetter 1985;

Emirbayer & Goodwin 1994; Jones 1999; Diani 2003). The latter describes how social

membership is an outcome of collective identity (Diani 2003) which is materialised by

individuals’ decisions to unite with others in order to achieve social goals – here the release of

an OS application (Von Krogh et al. 2003; Bessen 2006; Spaeth et al. 2008).



However, we argue that there is more to socialisation than the sum of members’

identities. In a way, community participation cannot be studied separately from actors’

practices of engagement and platforms’ features, which enable and sustain them. How a ML’s

subscribers for instance, communicate and challenge other subscribers is a product of the

conversational thread. The latter is a product in itself of the ML’ capabilities to organise and

present post-exchanges (the email client). Not only do a ML enable communication, but it

organises it (Hansen et al. 2011), so that post-exchanges become a socio-technical assemblage

where subscribers and the content of their posts are defined and redefined over time.

This socialisation space is material and traceable, which adds significantly to the scope

and visibility of projects. First, it offers a great opportunity for us to sneak a peek into the

organising of production (Ibrahim et al. 2010; Pattison et al. 2008; Spaeth et al. 2008; Kuk

2006; Sack et al. 2006). More importantly, it co-instantiates it, so that the quality of

participation is dependent on its working and the working of other embedded technologies

that facilitate collaboration. The platform architecture – the arrangement of functional data

structures, the mapping from the functional data structures to code components and the

specification of interfaces among components – affect the identity of an OS community, its

actions and goals. Therefore, participants and the quality of their engagement continue to be

negotiated through the double mangle of social interactions and changes in technology

features.

Accordingly, building an OS platform requires designing a code base and imagining its

scalability requirements in order to facilitate interactions and knowledge building practices.

This code base is endowed with capabilities and structure; it fosters a sense of belonging

among participants to the extent that it enlists users as a community framing their action

collectively. Indeed, OS project administrators make profuse use of web 2.0 technologies,

social media, data repositories, MLs, and online documents in order to orchestrate and archive

the content of their collective labour. New participants browse across collections of files,

documents and links before joining in. Such online spaces are interlinked, somewhat

resembling an emergent platform; i.e. an assemblage of communication tools, rather than one

unique production website.

Similarly to participants’ social dynamic, the features of a platform grow and expand

through use and into new data libraries, repositories and related communication tools. So, the

platform’s sustainability is dependent upon users’ practices of engagement. Similarly to OS



code, an OS platform is thus incomplete by nature; its meaning is both actual and gradually

co-instantiated by its long-term performance and evolving modes of use. Also, OS platforms

expand organically; gradually, layers of transactions start to flow out of interlinked sites –

units of communication, posts, collaboration, comments, uploads, etc.

They expand its meaning and domains of usability cementing by the same token the

links between subscribers. Each site is associated and points to a silo of data available

somewhere else. Each site is embedded and partly re-combined with other data proxies and

repositories creating a larger and more complex corpus of social practices, interactions and

data. Once pulled together, such unstructured and interconnected data repositories can be

mapped to create a multi-layered image of social activity and how it changes over time.



5 Conclusions

To conclude this first deliverable, we will briefly summarise the points

introduced in this documents. First we have announced that the main goal of this

research is establish a methodology for the study of community development and

particularly OS. This is hybrid as it does not side away with OS code or the social

actors in the first place. Instead it proposes to look at objects of mediation, in this

case OS platforms, in order to document how social actors interact and how OS code

is built and individuated. It also uses a mix of methods in order to map and follow

networks of connections over past, present and future.

Following on that, we have presented in this document a conceptual

underpinning that is very much relationist and which offers a constructivist view of

technology; this theoretical framework was encompassed within the notion of OS

biography. For that we have presented a brief overview of the OS scholarship and

identified important misgivings that could bias our understanding of OS participation

and its associated milieu, the OS platform. Then we have demonstrated how the

notion of biography accommodates research into the becoming of objects and social

phenomena; first looking at how such an approach has evolved among the study of

history and cultural studies of technology; then by examining its application in the

case of software – notably by Pollock and Williams

Finally we have concluded our theoretical conceptualisation, by characterising

what might be major dimensions in OS ontology and what should the OS biography

in particular seek to document (see Annex II). In the next deliverable, we will present

and detail our research strategy.

This should start by acknowledging that OS communities are distinctive forms

of collective, which are largely typified by the qualities of the digital apparatus – that

are interactivity and dynamism. Therefore we argue along with Rupert, Savage and

others (2013), that we need to attend to how those qualities demand rethinking the

theoretical assumptions of our social science methods. To do that, we will discuss first

the primary postulate of our approach and where it is situated in the sociological

literature and epistemologically.



Then we will examine how adopting a relational epistemology allows for those

who study OS communities and platforms to fix units of analysis based on practices,

interactions and process-based forms of platform engagement and participation.

Next, we will introduce computational and qualitative methods, which can offer both

a structural and process view of OS long-term development, as well as interact with

the features of OS platforms and assess them.

In the later stages of this research, we will illustrate this theoretical discussion

with an empirical study of an OS community using the notion of the OS biography

and our hybrid methodology. We will then start by introducing our case study and the

choices we made in terms of epistemology and data collection methods, as well as the

results of our analysis and discussion.



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Annexes

5.1 ANNEX I

Example of an OS platform

This network graph is the result of a Google search optimisation (SEO) that maps domain links

pointing out one particular web page – an OS homepage called Mifos.org. The grey area represents

production websites (such as, SourceForge, java, wikis, etc.). The blue area includes other resources

associated with this OS project, such as blogs, web and message archives. The other area contains

other associations: interlinked portals working in the same area and related NGO webpages.



5.2 ANNEX II

The OS Biography

The Macro View: OS Biography

The Micro View:

-1-Sustained Community Participation

Community

Participation

Epistemic, Plurality of practices, heterogeneity

Collective meaning, learning, transformation

-2- Material Platform

Code

Platform

Incomplete, Interactive, re-combinable

Duality: Structuring-Interactive

Cycles of Transformation and Knowledge Production (Time)

Open Source Biography: A review of the Open Source Software literature

Documents

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