TY - GEN
T1 - Boundary-spanning documents in online FLOSS communities
T2 - 46th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, HICSS 2013
AU - Østerlund, Carsten
AU - Crowston, Kevin
PY - 2013
Y1 - 2013
N2 - Online communities bring together people with varied access to and understanding of the work at hand, who must collaborate through documents of various kinds. We develop a framework articulating the characteristics of documents supporting collaborators with asymmetric access to knowledge versus those with symmetric knowledge. Drawing on theories about document genre, boundary objects and provenance, we hypothesize that documents supporting asymmetric groups are likely to articulate or prescribe their own 1) purpose, 2) context of use, 3) content and form and 4) provenance in greater detail than documents used by people with symmetric access to knowledge. We test these hypotheses through content analysis of documents and instructions from a variety of free/libre open source projects. We present findings consistent with the hypotheses developed as well as results extending beyond our theory derived assumptions. The study suggests new directions for research on communications in online communities, as well as advice for those supporting such communities.
AB - Online communities bring together people with varied access to and understanding of the work at hand, who must collaborate through documents of various kinds. We develop a framework articulating the characteristics of documents supporting collaborators with asymmetric access to knowledge versus those with symmetric knowledge. Drawing on theories about document genre, boundary objects and provenance, we hypothesize that documents supporting asymmetric groups are likely to articulate or prescribe their own 1) purpose, 2) context of use, 3) content and form and 4) provenance in greater detail than documents used by people with symmetric access to knowledge. We test these hypotheses through content analysis of documents and instructions from a variety of free/libre open source projects. We present findings consistent with the hypotheses developed as well as results extending beyond our theory derived assumptions. The study suggests new directions for research on communications in online communities, as well as advice for those supporting such communities.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84875513094&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=84875513094&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1109/HICSS.2013.119
DO - 10.1109/HICSS.2013.119
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:84875513094
SN - 9780769548920
T3 - Proceedings of the Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences
SP - 1600
EP - 1609
BT - Proceedings of the 46th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, HICSS 2013
Y2 - 7 January 2013 through 10 January 2013
ER -