Category Archives: Announcement

Politics of Cooption in Free and Open Communities

Announcement, Conference Contributions, Keynotes / Invited Talks, OpenSym 2016, Proceedings

Bradley Kuhn of Software Freedom Conservancy, will be presenting the following keynote at OpenSym 2016:

Title: Politics of Cooption in Free and Open Communities

Abstract: Developing software where all users have equal freedom to share, copy, modify and redistribute the software – in a community where all participants are equal – was once an odd fringe activity and cause only of interest to a small group of radical software developers. Today, this mechanism of sharing and collaboration is widely adopted not only by the software industry as a whole, but also by communities doing other collaborative work in areas as wide ranged as developing online encyclopedias, performing astrophysics research, and sharing information about users’ favorite television programs.

As “Open Source” has become a fad, it has been integrated into the larger culture. Furthermore, the software freedom movement has undeniably entered a period of cooption by for-profit companies who seek to exploit the benefits of these sharing communities, but do not necessarily wish to engage as equals with the individual hobbyists who build and foster those communities.

This talk, given by a practitioner who works daily in the politics of software freedom, will explore the current state of this political cooption, anecdotally examine how the political environment has begun to influence the structure of Open Source and Free Software projects, and consider whether these forces are likely to influence other non-software communities who have adopted the methodologies and principles of software freedom for their own work.

Speaker’s Biography: Bradley M. Kuhn is the President and Distinguished Technologist at Software Freedom Conservancy, on the Board of Directors of the Free Software Foundation (FSF), and editor-in-chief of copyleft.org. Kuhn began his work in the software freedom movement as a volunteer in 1992, when he became an early adopter of the GNU/Linux operating system, and began contributing to various Free Software projects. He worked during the 1990s as a system administrator and software developer for various companies, and taught AP Computer Science at Walnut Hills High School in Cincinnati. Kuhn’s non-profit career began in 2000, when he was hired by the FSF. As FSF’s Executive Director from 2001-2005, Kuhn led FSF’s GPL enforcement, launched its Associate Member program, and invented the Affero GPL. Kuhn was appointed President of Software Freedom Conservancy in April 2006, was Conservancy’s primary volunteer from 2006–2010, and has been a full-time staffer since early 2011. Kuhn holds a summa cum laude B.S. in Computer Science from Loyola University in Maryland, and an M.S. in Computer Science from the University of Cincinnati. Kuhn’s Master’s thesis discussed methods for dynamic interoperability of Free Software programming languages. Kuhn received the O’Reilly Open Source Award in 2012, in recognition for his lifelong policy work on copyleft licensing. Kuhn has a blog, is on pump.io and co-hosts the audcast, Free as in Freedom.

This contribution to OpenSym 2016 will be made available as part of the OpenSym 2016 proceedings on or after August 17, 2016.

Health & Play – Addressing together the challenges of creating an open source standard for breathing games

Announcement, Community Contributions, Conference Contributions, OpenSym 2016, Workshops

Title: Health & Play – Addressing together the challenges of creating an open source standard for breathing games

Authors: Fabio Balli (Concordia University)

Abstract: This proposed workshop invites us to discover an initiative – the Breathing Games – that aims to mobilize citizens around respiratory health by creating a free/libre and open source standard for health games – a common. After being presented the two years journey of the initiative, participants will use their skills and talents to meet the current challenges of an open collaboration projet.

This contribution to OpenSym 2016 will be made available as part of the OpenSym 2016 proceedings on or after August 17, 2016.

Benchlearning – A learning-format for best practice and knowledge sharing

Announcement, Community Contributions, Conference Contributions, OpenSym 2016

Title: Benchlearning – A learning-format for best practice and knowledge sharing

Authors: Benedikt Scheerer and Simon Dückert (Cogneon GmbH)

Abstract: In today’s business environment, industry and market entry barriers are vanishing (e.g.: in the automotive industry Google and Apple are about to enter the market). Moreover, due to the fierce global competition, companies are forced to come up with innovative (often also more complex) products. The digitalization even is about to rapidly transform also the business models of companies. Under those ever-changing market environments, the need for stronger cross-departmental, company-wide and even cross-company collaboration and also knowledge sharing becomes essential to cope with the mentioned challenges. Internal social media tools serve as the communication infrastructure for this needed knowledge sharing. Additionally, social media values transform the company culture.

In recent years, innovative companies have thus implemented those social media tools within the boundaries of the firm. Although names for these vary e.g. (Social Intranet, Corporate Social Network, Social Business, Enterprise 2.0) the challenges companies face when adopting these tools, especially after the technical implementation, are quite similar.

In 2011, we worked closely with a couple of customers in our region, e.g. adidas and Schaeffler. In our projects with them, we discovered that they were facing similar challenges regarding knowledge sharing efforts. Accordingly we discussed the idea of a cross-company learning format regarding knowledge sharing efforts. We chose Benchlearning as a format.

This contribution to OpenSym 2016 will be made available as part of the OpenSym 2016 proceedings on or after August 17, 2016.

Investigating teachers’ practices of using games in school: A pattern-based approach

Announcement, Conference Contributions, Open Educational Resources Track, OpenSym 2016, Proceedings, Research Contributions, Research Tracks, Short Research Papers

Title: Investigating teachers’ practices of using games in school: A pattern-based approach

Authors: Triinu Jesmin and Tobias Ley (Tallinn University)

Abstract: We introduce teachers’ practice patterns as a possible way to enhance knowledge building about game use in schools. We developed patterns through critical incident interviews with 15 Estonian school teachers and validated them in an online forum. We present the patterns, experiences around employing the approach for knowledge building and report some general themes on game use in schools that have emerged from this work.

This contribution to OpenSym 2016 will be made available as part of the OpenSym 2016 proceedings on or after August 17, 2016.

A Crowdsourcing Practices Framework for Public Scientific Research Funding Agencies

Announcement, Conference Contributions, Doctoral Symposium, OpenSym 2016

Title: A Crowdsourcing Practices Framework for Public Scientific Research Funding Agencies

Author: Eoin Cullina (Lero, NUI Galway), Kieran Conboy (Lero, NUI Galway) and Lorraine Morgan (Lero, Maynooth Univeristy)

Abstract: Scientific research and the work of public scientific research funding agencies (SRFAs) has in recent times been impeded by various obstacles and challenges. SRFAs are predominantly engaged in tasks surrounding the assessment and funding of scientific projects through research call processes. Such traditional processes face various problems. Firstly, scientific research in recent years has seen increased competition between participants for decreasing resources globally. Added competition and submissions brings a new layer of complexity to existing processes. Secondly, it is difficult to build and assess multidisciplinary and trans-disciplinary research projects through existing approaches. Thirdly, existing call assessment/peer review processes have shown intellectual insularity, a lack of flexibility and a lack of transparency in project selection mechanisms. It is posited that crowdsourcing presents solutions to many of these challenges. Whereas research has seen the advancement of various crowdsourcing models and taxonomies it is posited that many of these do not suit the specific needs of SRFAs. A practical contribution is required whereby practices are advanced to assist task completion by SRFAs in research assessment and funding processes. Open collaboration presents asa means to enable SRFAs. Accordingly, this research proposes adapting an exemplary crowdsourcing framework for selecting, formulating and evaluating crowdsourcing practices for use by public SRFAs.

This contribution to OpenSym 2016 will be made available as part of the OpenSym 2016 proceedings on or after August 17, 2016.

A quantitative study of TWiki at CERN after ten years of use

Announcement, Community Contributions, Conference Contributions, OpenSym 2016

Title: A quantitative study of TWiki at CERN after ten years of use

Author: Peter L. Jones (CERN IT/CDA)

Abstract: The European Organization for Nuclear Research known as CERN [1], is the home of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) [2] where physicists are recreating conditions close to those at the origin of the Universe. Although the LHC is based at CERN over 10,000 scientists and engineers from over 100 countries and hundreds of universities and laboratories collaborate on this project. TWiki [3] is an online collaboration platform and was introduced at CERN at the request of the LHC experiments, ALICE, ATLAS, CMS and LHCb have all used TWiki since its introduction. By analyzing the TWiki website statistics from 2006 until April 2016 this paper presents a quantitative study of how TWiki has been put into practice. The results will give a general picture of who is using the system and how this has evolved over the years.

This contribution to OpenSym 2016 will be made available as part of the OpenSym 2016 proceedings on or after August 17, 2016.

The Open Community Data Exchange: Advancing Data Sharing and Discovery in Open Online Community Science

Announcement, Community Contributions, Conference Contributions, OpenSym 2016

Title: The Open Community Data Exchange: Advancing Data Sharing and Discovery in Open Online Community Science

Authors: Georg J.P. Link and Matt Germonprez (University of Nebraska at Omaha Omaha), Sean Goggins (University of Missouri), Jeff Hemsley (Syracuse University), Bill Rand (University of Maryland), Megan Squire (Elon University)

Abstract: While online behavior creates an enormous amount of digital data that can be the basis for social science research, to date, the science has been conducted piecemeal, one internet address at a time, often without social or scholarly impact beyond the site’s own stakeholders. Scientists lack the tools, methods, and practices to combine, compare, contrast and communicate about online behavior across internet addresses or over time. In response, we are building the infrastructure for computational social scientists, social scientists, and citizens to make corresponding advances in our understanding of online human interactions. In this paper, we present our effort to specify the Open Community Data Exchange (OCDX) metadata standard to describe datasets, as well as the necessary infrastructure for creating, editing, viewing, sharing, and analyzing manifests. The purpose of this paper is to communicate the current state of our project and represent our current findings through our ongoing engagement with the scientific community and to engage in dialog among computational social scientists.

This contribution to OpenSym 2016 will be made available as part of the OpenSym 2016 proceedings on or after August 17, 2016.

Medical Science in the Lab Versus Medical Science in Wikipedia: Open Collaboration and Transformation of Scientific Knowledge Production

Announcement, Conference Contributions, Doctoral Symposium, OpenSym 2016

Title: Medical Science in the Lab Versus Medical Science in Wikipedia: Open Collaboration and Transformation of Scientific Knowledge Production

Author: Reham Al Tamime (University of Southampton – Web Science Institute)

Abstract: Wikipedia has challenged the way laboratory based knowledge is built and contested by creating an open socio technical environment that allows non domain experts to contribute to scientific and medical knowledge. The open nature of Wikipedia has been successful, but there are concerns about the quality and trustworthiness of its articles. The goal of my research is to investigate the process of knowledge creation in Wikipedia and observe the transformation of contested to accepted knowledge over time. By using Actor Network Theory and Social Network Analysis, the contribution of my research is to unveil the network dynamic that is behind statements’ dynamic in Wikipedia. In addition, this research is an opportunity to study how open collaboration models have transformed the scientific knowledge production inside labs.

This contribution to OpenSym 2016 will be made available as part of the OpenSym 2016 proceedings on or after August 17, 2016.

Generating Trust in Collaborative Annotation Environments

Announcement, Conference Contributions, Doctoral Symposium, OpenSym 2016

Title: Generating Trust in Collaborative Annotation Environments

Author: Jamal Al Qundus (Freie Universität Berlin – Institute of Computer Science)

Abstract: The main goal of this work is to create a model of trust which can be considered as a reference for developing applications oriented on collaborative annotation. Such a model includes design parameters inferred from online communities operated on collaborative content. This study aims to create a static model, but it could be dynamic or more than one model depending on the context of an application. An analysis on Genius as a peer production community was done to understand user behaviors. This study characterizes user in-teractions based on the differentiation between Lightweight Peer Production (LWPP) and Heavyweight Peer Production (HWPP). It was found that more LWPP- interactions take place in the lower levels of this system. As the level in the role system increases, there will be more HWPP- interactions. This can be explained as LWPP-interacions are straightforward, while HWPP-interations demand more agility by the user. These provide more opportunities and therefore attract other users for further interactions.

This contribution to OpenSym 2016 will be made available as part of the OpenSym 2016 proceedings on or after August 17, 2016.

Open Strategy: Rhetoric or Reality?

Announcement, Conference Contributions, Doctoral Symposium, OpenSym 2016

Title: Open Strategy: Rhetoric or Reality?

Author: Josh Morton (Loughborough University – School of Business and Economics)

Abstract: This research intends to extend research into the open strategy phenomenon by establishing a ‘rhetoric or reality’ approach to analyzing primarily one in-depth, longitudinal case study. This means a main objective of finding out more about the process of open strategy initiatives and to establish how the ideas collected from a wider range of organizational actors do, if at all, lead to new strategic directions. Our primary research question therefore asks ‘What practices do organizational actors engage in to construct strategic ideas in open strategy initiatives, and how are these ideas subsequently used by the organization?’. Addressing this question and emphasizing the episodic nature of open strategy will be especially important as open strategy becomes a more ubiquitous feature of organizational life, and needs not only a more confined definition, but also means of systematic analysis, helping to discover more about how those involved in open strategy contribute, and to what extent the actual initiatives are effective in informing future strategies.

This contribution to OpenSym 2016 will be made available as part of the OpenSym 2016 proceedings on or after August 17, 2016.