Participation and Knowledge Exchange in a Hybrid-Economic Software Community
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Participation and Knowledge Exchange in a Hybrid-Economic Software Community Warren S. Allen 1
Received: 24 October 2015 / Accepted: 3 February 2016 # Springer Science+Business Media New York 2016
Abstract Why and how technology professionals share and exchange knowledge and otherwise participate in peer-production and peer-support communities is an ongoing topic of study. Extant research skews toward online communities and toward opensource software (OSS) communities of developers, limiting what researchers can say about why and how knowledge-sharing and peer-support happens in cases where such practices are conducted beyond these settings. In this paper, I present results from a mixed methods study of the shared cultural knowledge in the Microsoft SharePoint user community, a global knowledge-sharing peer support community with substantial online and offline contexts. Learning, access to experts, and socio-professional motivations drive participation, but how the community provides for its constituents cannot be explain by theorizing the community as strictly a nonmarket institution but as a hybrid-economic institution constituted by interdependent market and nonmarket dynamics. The study also raises questions for future research regarding how the relationship between Bonline^ and Boffline^ manifestations of community participation are conceptualized. Keywords Knowledge exchange . Software communities . Ethnography . Mixed methods
Introduction Communities and networks of professionals are well-established in the literature as sources of knowledge sharing and exchange, both within organizations (Brown and Duguid 1991; Lave and Wenger 1991; Nonaka 1994) and between organizations (Granovetter 1985; Kogut and Zander 1996), and across the Web (Chen and Hung
* Warren S. Allen [email protected]
1
The iSchool at Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL, USA
J Knowl Econ
2010; Chiu et al. 2011). Many of these contexts operate independent of market-based institutions of the knowledge economy (Benkler 2002, 2006; Raymond 1999). Early studies of these environments find the motivations and conditions for knowledge sharing and exchange to be grounded in social norms such as reciprocity, gift exchange, trust, and the generation of social capital (for a comprehensive review, see Wang and Noe 2010). Such motivations shape—and are shaped by—an overarching open-source ideology that cuts across open-source software (OSS) projects (Stewart and Gosain 2006). Recent research explores differences across diversely motivated community constituents, including factors not commonly associated with (and sometimes in contrast to) open-source ideologies. The trend to hybridize software production, distribution, and licenses is evident in the software and professional service industries and has begun to receive attention in the research literature as business models adjust to new marketplace realities (Deodhar et al. 2012; Okoli and Nguyen 2015). This hybridizing trend will also be evident in the social contexts that facilitate knowledge
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