OSCC13 - Open entrepreneurship Exploring how entrepreneurs build social capital
Channel: AvaCon Inc
Date: 30/09/2013

We conducted a multi-method exploratory case study using data from a four-year period of the OpenSimulator project to investigate the following question: How do entrepreneurs contribute to the creation and accumulation of social capital in an open source community?  Our research reveals that entrepreneurs connect themselves to diverse sets of ties, position themselves as bridges between disparate network groups, and are centrally located within the network across both time periods, making them an integral part of the success of the community.

Zeynep Yetis is a PhD candidate at the Department of Marketing and Strategy at the Stockholm School of Economics (SSE). Focusing on open innovation, Zeynep is particularly interested in the social dynamics of open source communities, global platforms offering new means of organizing economic activity and knowledge creation. Zeynep investigates how these online communities self-organize and govern themselves and the role that entrepreneurs play in these communities.


About the OpenSimulator Community Conference 2013:  The OpenSimulator Community Conference is an annual conference that focuses on the community around the OpenSimulator software.  The conference features two days of presentations, workshops, keynote sessions, and social events across diverse sectors of the OpenSimulator user base.  Organized as a joint production by the Overte Foundation and AvaCon, Inc., the first annual conference was hosted on an OpenSimulator grid specifically designed for the conference, and had 369 attendees.  

For more information see http://conference.opensimulator.org.