The Emergence of governance in an open source community

Deskripsi

We have a good understanding of organizing processes in bureaucratic organizations, but not in community forms. More specifically, we know little about how communities producing collective goods govern themselves. With a multi-method study of one open source software community, we found that members developed a shared basis of formal authority, but limited it with democratic mechanisms that enabled experimentation with shifting conceptions of authority over time. When members settled on a shared conception of authority, it was more expansive than their original design. This finding is reinforced with a statistical test of the predictors of leadership. By blending bureaucratic and democratic mechanisms, the governance system was able to evolve with the community's changing conceptions of authority..Printed journal