Upstream First: An Ethnographic Study Of Open Source Software Community
Channel: The ASF
Date: 2022-08-19

Zhou, Jesse(周禹任）: Peking University, Student, Apache IoTDB Committer; Undergraduate student of Peking University; Coming graduate student at the University of Chicago.

This presentation is based on an in-depth research. The research aims to trace the formation and development of community-based innovation. Based on a 14-month ethnographic study in 10 open source communities, I systematically summarized the working mechanisms of open source software development. I identified four fundamental factors that underpin open source communities, including economy of community- based maintenance, iterative generation of value, incentives of professional networking, and entrepreneurship of core teams. A comprehensive framework incorporating these four factors is then constructed, which provides a dynamic process-based snowball model to explain the heterogeneity of open source communities. In contrast to previous literature, my field research suggests that there is convergence rather than divergence between community-based innovation and intra-firm R&D, thus opening up many possibilities for future research, such as comparing open source with closed source and exploring hybrid models of organizational innovation.