He earned his Ph.D. from Syracuse University's School of Information Studies, where his dissertation brought together the study of motivation and organization among community-based Free and Open Source software projects, developing a theory of collaboration through superposition. He undertook a post-doc at Carnegie Mellon University in the School of Computer Science prior to going to the University of Texas at Austin. His research examines the impact of information technology, especially software, on the organization of work. His current work focuses on the organization of scientific software production. He has presented at the International Conferences for Information Systems (ICIS) and Software Engineering (ICSE) and the Academy of Management. He has been invited to speak at industry conferences including O'Reilly’s eTech, OSCON, FOOcamp and SciFOO.