Title: Open Source Sustainability
Track: Collaboration Systems and Technologies
Description: Open source software and hardware underpin many contemporary information infrastructures. The responsibility for maintaining this infrastructure often depends on a small number of institutions and individuals working cooperatively to overcome collective action dilemmas. IS researchers have previously studied coordination, motivation, and collaboration within open-source communities, but are beginning to turn their attention towards activities involved in the maintenance, upkeep, and evolution of these collective action projects as networked infrastructure. This mini-track invites papers that focus on sociotechnical dimmensions of sustainability in open source. Topics and research areas include, but are not limited to:
- The evolution of governance models in open source communities
- Quantitative and Qualitative evaluations of sustainable open source software and hardware projects
- Economic models of open-source sustainability
- Shared schemes of credit and intellectual property ownership
- Controversies that emerge from unsustainable or failed open-source projects
Marketing Plan: The chairs of this mini-track will develop a website that describes the sessions goals and promotes a call for submissions. The chairs will advertise the session (and direct interested authors to the website) by posting the call for submissions to email lists for sociotechnical scholars, and open source researchers.
Short Bio-Sketch:
- Nic Weber, PhD, is an Assistant Professor at the University of Washingtion (Seattle) Information School. Dr. Weber's research interests include sociotechnical sustainability, open source and open data infrastructure development, and data studies more generally. He is a member of the DataLab and Technology for Social Change (TASCHA) group at the University of Washington, and the Technical Director of the Qualitative Data Repository at Syracuse University.
Journals: Not-applicable.
Statement: The chairs all have support of their institutions (University of Washingiton, X, and Y) to convene this mini-track. The chairs will attend the HICSS conference.