Making Deliberate Changes Possible in an Organizational Context of an Open Source Software Community

Abstract

In a task-executing environment of self-assignment, tasks that are less challenging but still important (for the overall work) face a risk of not being delivered on-time or executed at all. Based on longitudinal qualitative data collected over a period of four years, we seek to answer how deliberate changes are accomplished in an actor-oriented and collaborative open source software (OSS) community context. Our study makes four contributions. First, deliberate changes are made possible by four mechanisms of governance: self-leadership, reputation transfer, social influence and task redesign. Second, the study shows that a meritocracy- based OSS career system does not necessarily restrict power exclusively to the holder of community reputation. Power may in fact be distributed by reputation transfer to another significant agent involved in the change process (e.g. the change agent). Third, our results show that the potential risk of task negligence following from the principle of self-assignment may be mit...