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Although research on open collaboration for innovation has generally focused on the voluntary participation of individuals who are not strictly governed by formal authority concentrated at higher levels of organizational hierarchy, more recent studies highlight the importance of exploring how their tasks should be organized to enhance performance outcomes. This study extends this line of work by conceptualizing polyarchy as a decentralized decision-making structure that directs how core members of a project team screen a large collection of novel ideas generated by team members, and empirically examining whether and how polyarchy affects task completion time. In the context of online projects for open-source software development at GitHub, we find that a polyarchical decision-making structure reduces task completion time. Closer examination also shows that this positive effect on decision-making speed becomes stronger when tasks are explorative rather than exploitative in nature. Implications for open, distributed models of innovation and nontraditional forms of decision-making structures are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Participants in open collaboration communities coproduce knowledge despite minimal explicit communication to coordinate the efforts. Studying how participants coordinate around the knowledge artifact and its impacts are critical for understanding the open knowledge production model. This study builds on the theory of stigmergy, wherein actions performed by a participant leave traces on a knowledge artifact and stimulate succeeding actions. We find that stigmergy involves two intertwined processes: collective modification and collective excitation. We propose a new measure of stigmergy based on the spatial and temporal clustering of contributions. By analyzing thousands of Wikipedia articles, we find that the degree of stigmergy is positively associated with community members' participation and the quality of the knowledge produced. This study contributes to the understanding of open collaboration by characterizing the spatial-temporal clustering of contributions and providing new insights into the relationship between stigmergy and knowledge production outcomes. These findings can help practitioners increase user engagement in knowledge production processes in order to create more sustainable open collaboration communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate how the business model and the strategic intent to adopt an open collaboration initiative influence the perceived quality of collaboration outcomes. Design/methodology/approach – This paper presents a framework to analyze the role of the strategic dimension and the operational dimension in open collaboration initiatives through multiple case studies in three companies to understand how the open collaboration initiative was deployed and how was the level of the alignment between these two dimensions. Findings – The studied cases revealed that when an open collaboration initiative starts in the strategic dimension and there is an alignment between the organizational dimension and operational dimension, the collaboration outcomes are clearer and more traceable. Research limitations/implications – The study highlights the need to consider the involvement and the internal alignment between strategic and operational dimensions when deploying an open collaboration activity if they want to achieve all the benefits. Practical implications – The presented framework can help managers to evaluate and understand how open collaboration activities are deployed within the company. Social implications – The study shows that when an open collaboration initiative is planned, its results and benefits can be extended to local communities by developing them. Originality/value – This study aims to analyze the open collaboration initiative’s contribution to the overall organizational performance through the alignment between the organizational dimension and operational dimension perspective.

This research aims at understanding the open collaboration involved in producing Wikipedia Good Articles (GA). To achieve this goal, it is necessary to analyse who contributes to the collaborative creation of GA and how they are involved in the collaboration process. We propose an approach that first employs factor analysis to identify editing abilities and then uses these editing abilities scores to distinguish editors. Then, we generate sequence of editors participating in the work process to analyse the patterns of collaboration. Without loss of generality, we use GA of three Wikipedia categories covering two general topics and a science topic to demonstrate our approach. The result shows that we can successfully generate editor abilities and identify different types of editors. Then we observe the sequence of different editor involved in the creation process. For the three GA categories examined, we found that GA exhibited the characteristic of highly scored content-shaping ability editors involved in the later stage of the collaboration process. The result demonstrates that our approach provides a clearer understanding of how Wikipedia GA are created through open collaboration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As data-based research activities and outcomes increase and ontact or non-face-to-face activities become common, the demand for easy utilization of resources, tools, functions, and easily accessible information required for research in the R&D sector has increased accordingly. With the rapid increase in the demand for collaborative research based on online platforms, research support institutions strive to provide venues for research activities that merge various information and functions. ScienceON, an integrated science & technology (S&T) knowledge infrastructure service developed and operated by the Korea Institute of S&T Information (KISTI), supports open collaboration by connecting and merging all the information, functions, and infrastructure required for research activities. This paper describes the online research activity support tool provided by ScienceON and the remarkable results achieved through this activity. Specifically, the excellent creation of the following flow of meta-material research activities in the ontact space is elucidated. First, the papers required for a meta-material analysis are retrieved, virtual simulation is conducted with the experimental data extracted from the papers, and research data are accumulated. ScienceON’s tools for supporting ontact research activity will play a role as an important service in the era of digital transformation and open science.

Peer production online communities are groups of people that collaboratively engage in the building of common resources such as wikis and open source projects. In such communities, participation is highly unequal: few people concentrate the majority of the workload, while the rest provide irregular and sporadic contributions. The distribution of participation is typically characterized as a power law distribution. However, recent statistical studies on empirical data have challenged the power law dominance in other domains. This work critically examines the assumption that the distribution of participation in wikis follows such distribution. We use statistical tools to analyse over 6,000 wikis from Wikia/Fandom, the largest wiki repository. We study the empirical distribution of each wiki comparing it with different well-known skewed distributions. The results show that the power law performs poorly, surpassed by three others with a more moderated heavy-tail behavior. In particular, the truncated power law is superior to all competing distributions, or superior to some and as good as the rest, in 99.3% of the cases. These findings have implications that can inform a better modeling of participation in peer production, and help to produce more accurate predictions of the tail behavior, which represents the activity and frequency of the core contributors. Thus, we propose to consider the truncated power law as the distribution to characterize participation distribution in wiki communities. Furthermore, the truncated power law parameters provide a meaningful interpretation to characterize the community in terms of the frequency of participation of occasional contributors and how unequal are the group of core contributors. Finally, we found a relationship between the parameters and the productivity of the community and its size. These results open research venues for the characterization of communities in wikis and in online peer production.

It has become a burgeoning trend for the innovation paradigm to shift from producer-dominant to non-producer centric. Based on a critical review of the non-producer innovation literature, we identified several limitations of existing non-producer innovation paradigms--grassroots innovation, free innovation, common innovation, and social innovation--along two critical dimensions: responsibility governance of innovation outcomes and effective organizing form for collaborative innovation. To address the theoretical gaps in existing non-producer innovation research, we propose citizen innovation (CI) as a new integrated innovation paradigm to balance these two dimensions by focusing on citizens' unique role as innovators. In the paper, we discuss CI's theoretical framework from three aspects: (1) citizen participation in innovation; (2) open collaborative innovation as the organizing form; (3) the process and incentive mechanisms of citizen innovation. We also offer two real-world examples to support the main propositions and mechanisms of CI. To conclude, we reflect on the limitations of the current research and discuss future directions for CI research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the concept of crowd innovation or crowdsourcing that adopted by bloggers, in the popular press, the business community, and in academia. It mentions about different forms of crowdsourcing both in public and private to find help in solving problems and developing innovations; and also focuses on the toughest scientific and technological challenges that have been solved through contests.

In autumn 2018, a team within the University Library decided to advance the usage of different methods inspired by the perspectives within the field of “UX” to study the use of the learning spaces in the library. A special project concerned the students‟ use of group study rooms. Here the library employed a method where student mentors working for the library gathered basic statistical data through observations. The student mentors measured the usage of the study rooms, seats used, technology used in the rooms, sound levels etcetera at several time points each day. The information was continuously registered in a shared Google sheet that also worked as the basic tool for the analysis. The results of the study gave important guidance for the development of the study rooms and the learning environment in general. More importantly, the use of Google and the shared process of collecting and analyzing information was seen as a rewarding learning experience by the student mentors and the involved library staff. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The open source software (OSS) movement has become widely recognized as an effective way to deliver software. Even big software companies, well-known for being restrictive when it comes to publishing their source code artifacts, have recently adopted open source initiatives and released for general use the source code of some of their most notable products. We conducted an exploratory study on merits of the widespread belief that open-sourcing a proprietary software project will attract external developers, like casual contributors, and therefore improve software quality (e.g., “given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow”). By examining the pre- and post-migration software history of eight active, popular, non-trivial proprietary projects that became open source, we characterize the phenomenon and identify some challenges. Contrary to what many believe, we found that only a few projects experienced a growth in newcomers, contributions, and popularity; furthermore, this growth does not last long. The results from the study can be useful for helping software companies to better understand the hidden challenges of open-sourcing their software projects to attract external developers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Crowdsourcing is rapidly evolving and applied in situations where ideas, labour, opinion or expertise of large groups of people is used. Crowdsourcing is now used in various policy-making initiatives; however, this use has usually focused on open collaboration platforms and specific stages of the policy process, such as agenda-setting and policy evaluations. Other forms of crowdsourcing have been neglected in policy-making, with a few exceptions. This article examines crowdsourcing as a tool for policy-making and explores the nuances of the technology and its use and implications for different stages of the policy process. The article addresses questions surrounding the role of crowdsourcing and whether it can be considered as a policy tool or as a technological enabler and investigates the current trends and future directions of crowdsourcing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We study whether and how the diversity of editors and teams affects the quality of work in a virtual cooperative work environment on the Wikipedia example. We propose a measure of interests diversity of an editor and some measures of team diversity in terms of members' interests and experience. Statistical and machine learning methods are used to investigate the dependency between diversity and work quality. The presented experimental results confirm our hypothesis that interest diversity of a single editors and team diversity are positively related to the quality of their work. Interestingly, some of our experiments also indicate that diversity may be more important than such attributes as productivity of an editor or size or experience of the team. Our experimental results demonstrate that it is possible to predict work quality based on diversity which is an additional statistical signal that diversity is correlated with work quality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]