Track: Internet and Digital Economy
Minitrack: Open Movements: FLOSS, Open Contents, Open Access
                   and Open Communities

The minitrack intends to study a number of specific phenomena that share common characteristics of openness, but with distinctive features and issues. It will also include interdisciplinary research about these topics,
since these open initiatives have extended their influence beyond the software development field, and now raise challenging questions for many different areas.

Firstly, FLOSS is a broad term proposed for naming software released under some kind of free or open source software license. Currently, development and adoption of FLOSS projects spans a wide range of applications and critical infrastructure. Secondly, Open Content refers to published content (e.g., articles, engineering designs, pictures or any other type of multimedia) released under some form of open license, allowing the content to be modified and redistributed. Examples of Open
Contents are Wikipedia and MIT’s Open Courseware. These principles have also been extended to fields such as scientific collaboratories. Thirdly, Open Access Publishing means publishing of works in a way that allows access to interested users without financial or other barriers. Examples
include a variety of Open Access journals as well as a variety of institutional or topical paper repositories. Finally, around all types of projects we often find an active and even devoted community of developers, users, leaders, authors and readers, exhibiting complex interactions with each others.

Some of the aforementioned projects comprise both types of Open Communities (developing FLOSS and also open content, e.g., Wikipedia and Creative Commons). We also find other Open Communities of users in successful large projects, supporting interactions among users, and also
with open multimedia contents provided by users themselves, e.g., YouTube, MySpace, del.icio.us, Diggit, Twitter and Facebook.
Researchers from a variety of disciplines have turned their attention to the phenomenon of FLOSS, Open Content, Open Access Publishing and Open Communities, frequently presenting them as an intriguing new form of Internet-supported work and collaboration. However, open collaboration and peer production creates new challenges, as team members typically work in a distributed environment and often as volunteers rather than employees. The empirical literature on software engineering, programmers and the social and technical aspects of software development suggests
that such teams would face insurmountable difficulties in developing quality code or coherent information collections, yet in fact some of these teams have been remarkably successful. Understanding how these teams work is important, because a digital society entails an increased use of Internet-supported distributed teams for a wide range of knowledge work.

At the same time, open development is an important phenomena deserving of study in its own right. Millions of users depend on systems such as Linux and the Internet relies extensively on FLOSS tools, but as Scacchi notes, “little is known about how people in these communities coordinate
software development across different settings, or about what software processes, work practices, and organizational contexts are necessary to their success”. Wikipedia has quickly become an extensive and widely-used resource. Some studies, like the one presented by Giles in Nature
suggest that, despite the apparent heterogeneity of the group of authors behind Wikipedia, the accuracy of some of its articles could rival with other traditional encyclopedic projects like Encyclopedia Britannica, but we lack a deep understanding of the conditions of its production that
lead to such outcomes. Furthermore, there exists a clear trend in Public Administrations all over the world (with some remarkable cases like Australia, The Netherlands and Spain) towards the promotion and widespread adoption of FLOSS technologies. The main reasons behind this policy is enhancing the interoperability between different information systems, and at the same time, paving the way for facilitating the access of all citizens to e-Administration services.

This mini-track will provide a place for research and conceptual work to address a variety of questions, such as examining the implications of open content from economic and policy perspectives . As well, the mini-track welcomes studies of the deployment of FLOSS and OC studies, exploring the motivations of individuals to contribute to projects without pay. Studies of the structure and function of OSS development teams and OC communities are also in the scope of this mini-track, including analysis of the social networks created by those communities and their evolution over time.

We have chosen these specific focuses because recent workshops and conferences addressing the FLOSS phenomenon, including HICSS 42, have identified the need for further research on the process of software engineering in FLOSS, the need to compare FLOSS to other software
engineering paradigms and models, and also the need to find similitudes and differences between FLOSS development and other kinds of open development . Other commentators have suggested the need to study the work practices and social and organizational elements of open projects, as a model for distributed work. In the same way, HICSS has seen an increase of papers on FLOSS, OC, OA and OC Communities scattered across a variety of tracks. There is much intersection between
studies of OC development, motivations and impact and those of FLOSS development. Combining these overlapping areas will provide for a great interdisciplinary discussion of the various forms of Open Movements.

Possible topics for this mini-track include:

• Motivations for participation in open projects

• Ideologies behind open projects

• Member satisfaction and effectiveness in open projects

• Creators' roles in open projects and their evolution over time

• Leadership, management and policies in open projects

• Distributed project management and distributed team management

• Distributed collaboration in and coordination of open projects

• User involvement and user support in open projects

• Knowledge management and learning in open projects

• Issues in distributed software development for FLOSS

• Issues in content development in open content and open communities

• Distributed group development for open projects

• Problems in implementing open practices

• Open projects as Communities of Practice

• Social networks of open projects

• Economics of open projects

• Community development and its evolution in Open Communities

• Information quality and credibility of open content

• Applications and adoption of open project products

• Implementation of FLOSS systems

• FLOSS systems supporting open projects

• Forecasting the evolution of open movements

Minitrack Co-Chairs:

Kevin Crowston (Primary Contact)
Syracuse University
School of Information Studies
Hinds Hall 348
Syracuse, NY 13244–4100
Phone: 315-443–1676
Email: crowston@syr.edu

Vandana Singh
School of Information Sciences
University of Tennessee Knoxville
451 Communications Bldg.
1345 Circle Park Drive
Knoxville, TN 37996-0341
Phone: 865-974-2785
Email: vandana@utk.edu

Felipe Ortega
Universidad Rey Juan Carlos
Tulipán s/n (28933)
Mostoles, Madrid, Spain
Phone: +34-91-488-8523
Email: jfelipe@gsyc.escet.urjc.es