Introduction to Digital Work

Lecture 8 - Digital work in crowds

Open-Source work

Introduction to Digital Work
Introduction to Digital Work

Learning objectives

  • Learn how to use the collaboration features of Git, including forks, pull requests, merges, and issues
  • Apply them in a realistic setting of multiple contributors
  • Familiarize with the key elements of open-source project documentation
Introduction to Digital Work

The Open-Source Collaboration Game

Materials for this part are available here

Introduction to Digital Work

Break

Introduction to Digital Work

Concepts and principles for collaborative Open-Source work

Conceptual foundations

  • Transparent versioning: code, people, and processes are visible and enable stigmergic coordination
  • Openness to modifications: everyone can create issues, suggest specific code modifications, or fork the project
  • Control of contributions: maintainers can review changes proposed in pull request (with the help of code quality checkers, automated builds and tests, and GenAI Code Review), request changes, and decide whether or not to merge the contributions

Principles

  • Freedom to use, study, modify, share
  • Meritocracy instead of organizational hierarchy
  • Decentralization and open governance
Introduction to Digital Work

Work in Open-Source projects

The well-known book of Raymond (1999), "The Cathedral and the Bazaar", compares two models of software development:

  • The Cathedral model, in which an exclusive group of developers works on a project and releases it to the public.
  • The Bazaar model, in which code is developed publicly, allowing anyone to contribute.

This distinction raises interesting questions on how effective work can be organized in the absence of hierarchical control.

Introduction to Digital Work

Work in Open-Source projects (continued)

Raymond summarizes 19 lessons learned from open source software projects. These include:

  • Every good work of software starts by scratching a developer's personal itch.
  • Good programmers know what to write. Great ones know what to rewrite (and reuse).
  • Plan to throw one (version) away; you will, anyhow
  • Release early. Release often. And listen to your customers.
  • Given a large enough beta-tester and co-developer base, almost every problem will be characterized quickly and the fix obvious to someone.
  • The next best thing to having good ideas is recognizing good ideas from your users. Sometimes the latter is better.
Introduction to Digital Work

Challenges in Open-Source work

Challenges:

  • The lack of hierarchical control can lead to conflicts and coordination problems
  • Self-selection into tasks can be inefficient (e.g., for beginners, tasks that are not interesting)
  • Establishing open, welcoming, and inclusive communities
  • Values and goals may differ across contributors ("free as in beer" or "free as in free speech")

Open-Source projects implement measures to address these challenges:

  • Licenses (e.g., GPL vs MIT), which are legal documents, but also signal shared norms and values
  • A code of conduct, which defines acceptable behavior and sanctions for violations
  • Governance structures, which define the roles and responsibilities of contributors
  • Technologies and organizing best practices, which facilitate coordination and collaboration (e.g., issue labels identifying "good first issues" for beginners)
Introduction to Digital Work

Summaries for part 2: Digital work in teams

Introduction to Digital Work

Materials

Aksulu, A., & Wade, M. R. (2010). A comprehensive review and synthesis of open source research. Journal of the Association for Information Systems, 11(11), 6.

Raymond, E. (1999). The cathedral and the bazaar. Knowledge, Technology & Policy, 12(3), 23-49.

- Describe the key concepts and processes of Open-Source projects. - Follow Open-Source practices to contribute to a shared project. - Explain how different technologies can help to organize Open-Source work.

--- Sumary: Key concepts and processes - Fork - Pull request - Maintainer - ...

Note: Powerful and efficient model - almost no limitations for modifications (even forks are possible) - introduces variation - very efficient control mechanisms

Transition: Teams to Crowds (lecture)

Underlying: - Intrinsic motivation replacing extrinsic rewards (money) - How to work with existing resources (code): the question shifts from the initial creation of code to the assessment, selection and reuse of existing code. Even ideation is crowd-sourced (see 11) - Incremental work is useful to coordinating across development efforts. - Linus law (8): assumption that every non-trivial program has bugs. The question shifts from the prevention of bugs to the detection and fixing of bugs. The fixing by the community is only possible when the code is open. This is particularly relevant for security issues.

TODO : afterwards, we have a good basis to compare/evaluate open-source projects (commits/contributors/pull-requests/issues) Self-selection: inefficient for beginners, for tasks that are not attractive, or tasks that are not visible, or tasks that are too challenging Coordination problems: often addressed by forks (redundant work) Need for code of conduct, ... --- # Open-Source philosophy values --- # Open-Source challenges Challenges? - How to facilitate self-selection into tasks (especially beginners) - Tone/code of conduct (refer to control theory - clan control) - Mention possibility of multiple forks (intention to contribute to the original project vs. to create a new project) - TBD: licenses (associated values) -> methods / leadership / control questions Later: add: The technologies and organizing best practices (solutions) https://www.coursera.org/learn/open-source-software-development-methods#syllabus https://whatthediff.ai/ https://github.com/marketplace/what-the-diff -> AI / prompting to rewrite code / to summarize pull requests