<p>Purpose: The objective of this study is to illustrate how participants in leaderless based projects communicate with each other. Several studies have focused on technology-supported projects, such as open source projects, with an established project manager and goal. There is a lack, to the best of our knowledge, in studies that deal with the communication pattern in a leaderless computer supported collaborative project.</p><p>Method: We have chosen to use a quantitative method where we systematically group several messages according to their content. This method was used in a similar study to illustrate the communication between participants involved in an open source project. We have taken the same Kripendorff based method and adapted it to our study by adding more descriptive variables.</p><p>Theoretical perspectives: Manuel Castell discusses the aspects of a new communication power that is rooted in the individual as part of a larger creative audience. The collaborative works we have studies are prime examples of how the creative audience works together and of mass self‐communication. In order to analyze the potential motivations behind the participant’s involvement in these collaborative works, we have adopted the ideas of Preece and Shneidermans frame theory. They have identified 4 major roles in most onlinebased co‐operations and refer to them as reader, contributor, collaborator and leader.</p><p>Result: Our results show that the communication in computer supported collaborative works is characterized by positive and energetic communication. The participants are all involved by their own will; they contribute because they want to. We believe this to be the major factor influencing the flow and form of communication between the participants. The majority of posts are comments to other participants or contributing posts that add to the progression of the discourse. We also have reason to believe that the use of smileys and embedded pictures is related to the tools available to the participants; the quicker and easier it is to add a picture the more likely the participants will use these tools.</p>

Free/Open Source Software (FOSS) communities often use open bug reporting to allow users to participate by reporting bugs. This practice can lead to more duplicate reports, as inexperienced users can be less rigorous about researching existing bug reports. The purpose of this research is to determine the extent of this problem, and how FOSS projects deal with duplicate bug reports. We examined 12 FOSS projects: 4 small, 4 medium and 4 large, where size was determined by number of code contributors. First, we found that contrary to what has been reported from studies of individual large projects like Mozilla and Eclipse, duplicate bug reports are a problem for FOSS projects, especially medium-sized projects. These medium sized projects struggle with a large number of submissions and duplicates without the resources large projects use for dealing with these. Second, we found that the focus of a project does not affect the number of duplicate bug reports. Our findings point to a need for additional scaffolding and training for bug reporters of all types. Finally, we examine the impact that automatic crash reporting has on these bug repositories. These systems are quickly gaining in popularity and aim to help end-users submit vital bug information to the developers. These tools generate stack traces and memory dumps from software crashes and package these up so end-users can submit them to the project with a single mouse-click. We examined Mozilla's automatic crash reporting systems, Breakpad and Socorro, to determine how these integrate with the open bug reporting process, and whether they add to the confusion of duplicate bug reports. We found that though initial adoption exhibited teething troubles, these systems add significant value and knowledge, though the signal to noise ratio is high and the number of bugs identified per thousand reports is low. / Graduation date: 2012

Virtuelle Communities bezeichnen Gemeinschaften von Individuen, die maßgeblich über das Internet miteinander kommunizieren und kollaborieren. Anders als in Unternehmen, in denen Motivationsstrukturen primär auf finanziellen Anreizen basieren, gilt für Virtuelle Communities, dass die Zuarbeit in diesen in der Regel freiwillig und ohne monetäre Interessen der Mitglieder stattfindet. Unternehmen nutzen Virtuelle Communities für Zwecke des Customer Relationship Management, des Wissensmanagement und des Customer Integration. Universitäten bilden virtuelle Lernnetzwerke, um die Interaktion zwischen Studierenden zu erhöhen und hierdurch Lernerfolge zu steigern. Die Potenziale Virtueller Communities werden jedoch in vielen Fällen nicht vollständig ausgeschöpft. Insbesondere der Frage nach einer systematischen Mitgliedersteuerung kommt aufgrund der vorherrschenden komplexen Motivationsstrukturen der freiwillig partizipierenden Mitglieder eine besondere Bedeutung zu. In bisherigen wissenschaftlichen Arbeiten wurde dieser Aspekt jedoch vernachlässigt. Das Untersuchungsdesign der Arbeit zielt darauf ab, diese Forschungslücke zu schließen und einen Ordnungsrahmen zu gestalten, der einen systematischen Aufbau, Betrieb und insbesondere eine Steuerung Virtueller Communities ermöglicht. Die Identifikation von Steuerungsinstrumenten wurde im Rahmen der Arbeit durch eine Analyse der Strukturen und Funktionsweisen in Open Source-Projekten vorgenommen, anschließend wurden diese auf andere Typen Virtueller Communities übertragen. Im Rahmen zweier Fallstudien wurde der entwickelte Ordnungsrahmen unter realen Bedingungen an einem Expertennetzwerk an der Börse Berlin AG und einem universitären Lernnetzwerk erprobt. Die anschließende Analyse gibt Aufschluss über die Wirkungsweisen wettbewerblicher, kooperativer und hierarchischer Steuerungsinstrumente in Virtuellen Communities. / A virtual community can be understood as a group of people sharing common interests, ideas, and feelings by using the internet or other collaborative networks. In contrast to companies where contributors are mainly motivated by financial incentives, virtual communities are based on voluntarily participation and non-monetary benefits. Companies build up virtual communities to support customer relationship management, customer integration or knowledge management. Universities use virtual learning communities to increase knowledge transfer among students. However, the potential of virtual communities can not completely tapped without efficient and systematic approaches of community engineering. Members usually participate voluntarily in virtual community and therefore are characterized by a complex motivational structure. This aspect has not been discussed in scientific literature intensively. The research design of this contribution aims on developing a framework that can be used to systematically build up a virtual community. By analyzing open source projects several instruments of member management were identified and transferred to different types of virtual communities. By developing a case study design the practical relevance of the theoretical model was measured. A network of experts at Berlin stock exchange and a learning network at University of Potsdam were analysed. Surveys, interviews as well as data examinations were used to evaluate the effects of instruments of a systematic member management and different types of coordination such as hierarchy, competition and cooperation.

Purpose: The objective of this study is to illustrate how participants in leaderless based projects communicate with each other. Several studies have focused on technology-supported projects, such as open source projects, with an established project manager and goal. There is a lack, to the best of our knowledge, in studies that deal with the communication pattern in a leaderless computer supported collaborative project. Method: We have chosen to use a quantitative method where we systematically group several messages according to their content. This method was used in a similar study to illustrate the communication between participants involved in an open source project. We have taken the same Kripendorff based method and adapted it to our study by adding more descriptive variables. Theoretical perspectives: Manuel Castell discusses the aspects of a new communication power that is rooted in the individual as part of a larger creative audience. The collaborative works we have studies are prime examples of how the creative audience works together and of mass self‐communication. In order to analyze the potential motivations behind the participant’s involvement in these collaborative works, we have adopted the ideas of Preece and Shneidermans frame theory. They have identified 4 major roles in most onlinebased co‐operations and refer to them as reader, contributor, collaborator and leader. Result: Our results show that the communication in computer supported collaborative works is characterized by positive and energetic communication. The participants are all involved by their own will; they contribute because they want to. We believe this to be the major factor influencing the flow and form of communication between the participants. The majority of posts are comments to other participants or contributing posts that add to the progression of the discourse. We also have reason to believe that the use of smileys and embedded pictures is related to the tools available to the participants; the quicker and easier it is to add a picture the more likely the participants will use these tools.

Business management Paradigm is Changing. We used to have big, best, and fast and now it seems that we are having one more paradigm of “Open”. Chesbrough (2003) argued for cooperating between competitors or allies in his article “The era of open innovation”. (ChesbroughH.W, 2003) This research is about open innovation with customer participation. Many organizations built platform to motivate customers to participate the product development process. Hence, we selected three different types of platforms which are full-open, semi-open and closed platform for case study. To compare different perspective from organizations and customers, we will use both of case study of the organizations who opened competencies to the customers and survey of the customers who are creating derivative products. From that case-study and survey result, we aim to figure out what to open and what to close for the organizations that are implementing open innovation strategy. We will suggest a competency pyramid model that helps organizations to divide their competencies into two different sectors: open competency and closed competency. And finally, we will find out what factors are important to make a platform successful.

Environmental metrics play a significant role in behavioural change, policy formation, education, and industrial decision-making. Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is a powerful framework for providing information on environmental impacts, but LCA data is under-utilized, difficult to access, and difficult to understand. Some of the issues that are required to be resolved to increase relevancy and use of LCA are accessibility, validation, reporting and publication, and transparency. This thesis proposes that many of these issues can be resolved through the application of open frameworks for LCA software and data. The open source software (OSS), open data, open access, and semantic web movements advocate the transparent development of software and data, inviting all interested parties to contribute. A survey was presented to the LCA community to gauge the community’s interest and receptivity to working within open frameworks, as well as their existing concerns with LCA data. Responses indicated dissatisfaction with existing tools and some interest in open frameworks, though interest in contributing was weak. The responses also pointed out transparency, the expansion of LCA information, and feedback to be desirable areas for improvement. Software for providing online LCA databases was developed according to open source, open data, and linked data principles and practices. The produced software incorporates features that attempt to resolve issues identified in previous literature in addition to needs defined from the survey responses. The developed software offers improvements over other databases in areas of transparency, data structure flexibility, and ability to facilitate user feedback. The software was implemented as a proof of concept, as a test-bed for attracting data contributions from LCA practitioners, and as a tool for interested users. The implementation allows users to add LCA data, to search through LCA data, and to use data from the software in separate independent tools.. The research contributes to the LCA field by addressing barriers to improving LCA data and access, and providing a platform on which LCA database tools and data can develop efficiently, collectively, and iteratively.

Open Source Software has been all about myths until recently, with many people believing that open source isn't reliable because the open source projects are held by a small group of amateurs in their friend's garage. Such myths have been refuted with the emerging success and increased popularity of open source, but still many considered open source and proprietary software to be enemies, which can never co-exist in the corporate platform. As a result, some firms have decided to stick to their tradition of commercial software development, while new firms, which base their corporate strategy solely on open source, have emerged. The former group of firms has suffered from losing time and money in fixing the errors and bugs in the software, whereas the latter group has found difficulties in finding financial support and market share in competition among the former group. Neither group has found absolute success in their business, as result a compromise model has emerged in the software industry, which resulted in a third group of firms that work neither with pure open source model nor with pure proprietary models, but instead with “hybrid” business models which allows integration of these so-called two enemies. Such firms have overcome the pitfalls of both approaches, while combining the benefits of them. The growing success of open-source integration attracted further public attention on the potential importance of open-source software (OSS). Indeed, major large commercial IT companies have started to integrate open-source software into their core strategies. Despite the widespread doubts and resistance during the early stages of open source revolution, there has recently been a “change of perception” in the software development industry towards incorporating open source strategies into their business models. This master thesis investigates the open source software scene in Sweden by examining Swedish firms that develop software products either based on open source components (hybrid model) or just open source products (pure open source model). After analyzing the market based on the business models of these firms, further details of the open source strategies pursued by these firms have been analyzed. Our study then finalizes the investigation with an analysis of the open source development scene in Sweden, which we use to determine the characteristics of the software industry in Sweden. Our conclusions reveal that open source strategy shares most of its components with innovation strategy (with some components found to be specific to open source strategy only), confirming the link between open source software and innovation. Therefore, firms that work with open source software have to pay attention to innovation and form an appropriate innovation and open source strategy if they want to be successful in the software industry.

<p><strong>Introduction:</strong> Open Source ERP is considered as a viable alternative of proprietary ERP paradigm. Open Source ERP is getting more and more acceptance among Small and Medium Sized Enterprises (SMEs) recently. Majority of Proprietary ERP vendors are changing their strategy nowadays and extend their focus on SMEs, even though SMEs are not that interested in Proprietary ERP systems. The factors that may motivate SMEs to select an Open Source ERP over proprietary ERP are not identified empirically in previous researches. Few researches raised the issue of cost and thus proposed that Open Source ERP is appropriate for SMEs. The other factors than cost involved in the selection process are yet to investigate empirically.</p><p><strong>Purpose:</strong> The overall purpose of this thesis work is to contribute in knowledge domain of Open Source ERP. Open Source ERP is an emergent area but it has the potential to attract many organizations to implement this kind of ERP Systems. The issue under investigation throughout this research will be the selection process of Open Source ERP in Small and Medium Sized Enterprises (SMEs). The focus will be to identify mutually most important factors, from the perspective of SMEs and Suppliers that may motivate the Small and Medium Sized Enterprises (SMEs) to select OS ERP.</p><p><strong>Method:</strong> Data obtained from the respondents is quantified in the research. Information gathered from the SMEs who have implemented Open Source ERP and from the Suppliers through web based survey. Two separate questionnaires comprised of various questions related to different factors in selecting of Open Source ERP solutions were made and sent to both SMEs and Suppliers of Open Source ERP. Opinion from an Open Source ERP expert is obtained regarding different factors motivate SMEs to select Open Source ERP. The results obtained from respondents through empirical findings were analyzed thereafter.</p><p><strong>Conclusions:</strong> SMEs were investigated regarding the importance of various rationales when they were selecting Open Source ERP solutions. The degree of importance of various factors in selection process might be diverse from organization to organization. It might be dependent on the size, geographical location of the organization or many other issues. Despite all this, there might be some common factors that may be always considered as foremost factors which influence SMEs to select an Open Source ERP over proprietary ERP.</p>

Open Access bezeichnet den Wunsch, wissenschaftliche Literatur und Materialien im Internet prinzipiell frei, d.h. kostenlos und ohne Lizenzbeschränkungen, zugänglich zu machen.

Im Internet hat die Wissensgesellschaft des 21. Jahrhunderts ihr Medium der Zukunft gefunden. Aus der historischen Perspektive der Aufklärung ist die Menschheit dem Ziel näher denn je, möglichst vielen Menschen ungehinderten Zugang zu Information und Wissen zu verschaffen.