Last week, I attended The OpenForum Academy Symposium in Berlin. This is Open Forum Europe’s (OFE) academic conference around open source with the goal of collaboration between researchers, industry, and folks working on policy to share ideas and eventually generate more academic research that is useful for open source policy people. In an effort to avoid a 10 page blog post, I’ll only cover the highlights of a few talks that I found particularly interesting and that seem more relevant for CHAOSS.
In the first keynote, Julia Ferraioli and Juniper Lovato talked about the Beyond the Repository ACM Paper that they co-authored with Amanda Casari. I personally think this should be required reading for anyone doing research in open source. The paper goes in depth into why researchers should think about how their methods and results impact entire open source ecosystems, including the people working within the projects being studied. The paper is organized into nine best practices that help researchers understand how they might design their studies in ways that keep the ethical implications and ecosystem impact of their research top of mind. In particular, they suggest that researchers actively work with the practitioners involved in the projects as they look beyond the repository to gather data and consider the ramifications of the research.
The keynote was followed by several presentations focused on Open Source Communities and Cooperatives. Jérémie Haese talked about the working paper (to be published in Management Science), Open at the Core: Moving from Proprietary Technology to Building a Product on Open Source Software, that he is writing jointly with Christian Peukert using Microsoft’s move to Chromium as a case study. Among other things, they saw an increase in the pool of contributors along with more people reporting security vulnerabilities due to increased bug bounties offered by Microsoft resulting in an increasing number of vulnerabilities being fixed.
Jorge Benet presented, A Cooperative Model for Digital Infrastructure and Recommendations to Adopt It, which has been fully published. The report discusses their findings from 21 digital infrastructure projects from 12 cooperatives across 7 countries with a model that looks at value creation, proposition, and capture with recommendations for projects wishing to adopt the model.
Elçin Yenişen Yavuz talked about how user-led open source foundations are different from other types of foundations. While many of us work on projects in foundations led by communities and vendors, the foundations led by users of the software (e.g., Apereo Foundation, Academy Software Foundation, openMDM) have more direct benefits for the end users, including more control over functionality, shared resources, sustainability, and productivity. Results of some of this research can be found in the Problems, Solutions, and Success Factors in the openMDM UserLed Open Source Consortium paper in Communications of the Association for Information Systems.
There were a few talks about Legal implications from Open Source, which is a bit less relevant for the CHAOSS audience, but there was one talk from Wayne Wei Wang, Open-Source Commons Made in China: A Case Study of OpenAtom Foundation and Mulan-series Licenses, that I found interesting partly because some of us have been working with the folks at openEuler, which is an OpenAtom project under a Mulan-series license. Wayne talked about some ways that open source is different in China due to Chinese state entrepreneurialism and the relationships between central planning and open source. This is based on Wayne’s research paper: China’s digital transformation: Data-empowered state capitalism and social governmentality.
I found Knut Blind’s talk, Open Source in the Context of Innovation, particularly interesting, since it talked about various measures of innovation in open source. He shared the stage with a handful of others as they talked about how existing research on innovation using patents and papers can be compared to open source innovation by looking at open source contributions (like commits) as a comparison to patents and cited papers, which aren’t as dissimilar as they might seem if you think about how they all share a similar process that goes from submission through review and finally into publication / release. They also talked about using the GitHub Innovation Graph to look at open source innovation for various national economies. Finally, they talked about how dependencies can be used when looking at innovation, but that there are some challenges with this approach when you try to compare projects to understand innovation. For example, Javascript modules tend to be designed for integration into projects, so they will have many more dependencies than C/C++ projects, which are often designed as standalone apps.
Nataliya Wright’s talk, Open Source Software and Global Entrepreneurial Growth, looked at how contributing to open source can spur global entrepreneurial growth. They found that contributing to open source predicts higher valuations and funding for IT ventures (note that some, but not all, of this is related to selection bias based on the types of companies and founders that contribute). While the talk was based on new research, some of their early stage results can be found in the Research Policy paper, Open Source Software and Global Entrepreneurship.
This was a really interesting conference with many more talks than I could cover here, and I’m already looking forward to next year’s conference!