Open Source Production Research Articles

An open-source framework for balancing computational speed and fidelity in production cost models

Abstract Studies of bulk power system operations need to incorporate uncertainty and sensitivity analyses, especially around exposure to weather and climate variability and extremes, but this remains a computational modeling challenge. Commercial production cost models (PCMs) have shorter runtimes, but also important limitations (opacity, license restrictions) that do not fully support stochastic simulation. Open-source PCMs represent a potential solution. They allow for multiple, simultaneous runs in high-performance computing environments and offer flexibility in model parameterization. Yet, developers must balance computational speed (i.e. runtime) with model fidelity (i.e. accuracy). In this paper, we present Grid Operations (GO), a framework for instantiating open-source, scale-adaptive PCMs. GO allows users to search across parameter spaces to identify model versions that appropriately balance computational speed and fidelity based on experimental needs and resource limits. Results provide generalizable insights on how to navigate the fidelity and computational speed tradeoff through parameter selection. We show that models with coarser network topologies can accurately mimic market operations, sometimes better than higher-resolution models. It is thus possible to conduct large simulation experiments that characterize operational risks related to climate and weather extremes while maintaining sufficient model accuracy.

Cheap and Simple Electrochemical Sensors with Closed-Cell MIP-Coated Bipolar Electrode Arrays for Sub-Ppb Detection of PFOS in Water

Growing public awareness of the health risks associated with long-term exposure to poly- and perfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) has necessitated the development of low-cost, point of use, and accessible methods for detection in water. Efforts to develop such methods have been stymied by their very low concentrations (part per trillion level) and remarkable chemical stability. Recently, our group has developed a new technique termed optical anodic stripping voltammetry (o-ASV) which couples a closed-cell continuous bipolar electrochemical (BPE) sensor with cathodic electrochemiluminescence (ECL) reporting for the simple, rapid, and point-of-use detection of heavy metal ions in water. The work presented here, on the other hand, is aimed at adapting this same sensor transduction scheme to the quantitation of PFAS compounds. The primary challenge is accommodating the electrochemical inactivity exhibited by most PFAS compounds. This presentation will describe development of a molecular imprint polymer (MIP) layer on the surface of the sensor BPE to promote both selectivity and sensitivity in detection. The MIP layer works in combination with a proxy redox probe, ferrocene carboxylate (FcCOOH), to transduce the current signal to an optical readout that can be read with a digital camera like those on most modern cellular phones. This presentation will focus on describing the nature of the sensor transduction principle as applied to non-redox active PFAS compounds like perfluorooctanoic sulfonate (PFOS). A specific discussion of the operative mechanistic components of detection will be addressed, including the interplay between molecular adsorption, diffusion, and electrochemical transformation. Details of the stability and functional longevity of the electropolymerized MIP layer will be discussed along with its application to other isomorphic PFAS compounds. Finally, a new simple device fabrication procedure will be highlighted as it pertains to the open-source production of these novel sensors.

Official Survey Data and Virtual Worlds—Designing an Integrative and Economical Open Source Production Pipeline for xR-Applications in Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises

How can official survey data be prepared for virtual worlds? For small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), these steps can still be very time-consuming. This article is vital for these companies, since its aim is to create a practical open source solution for everyday work based on up-to-date research. Developing integrated Virtual Reality applications for geographic information systems VRGIS today, we are facing following problems: georeferenced data are currently available in many different data formats. Often there is a lack of common standards, user-friendliness and possibilities for process automation, just as the correct georeferencing in virtual worlds is an open field. It is shown that open source platforms can offer very interesting, practical and economical solutions. Following the method of structured and focused comparison according to George and Bennett, fourteen current software solutions are presented as examples. The applications can be classified according to the taxonomy of Anthes et al., with regard to output devices and software development. A comprehensive networking matrix for applied interactive technologies will be introduced for SME partner searches in related software developments. The evaluation criteria of integration capability, operability without programming knowledge and cost-effectiveness allow for a subsequent discussion and evaluation. Finally, this paper presents a simple proprietary and open-source software solution for small and medium-sized enterprises. Map illustrations and methods for georeferencing are explained. Exemplary digital products and data formats are presented at the Landesamt für Digitalisierung, Breitband und Vermessung (LDBV) in Bavaria.

The civilian's visual security paradox: how open source intelligence practices create insecurity for civilians in warzones

ABSTRACTImages taken by civilians and shared online have become an important source of conflict intelligence. This article explores issues around how states and non-state actors appropriate civilians’ images to produce intelligence about conflict, critically scrutinizing a practice often called open source or social media intelligence. It argues that image appropriation for open-source intelligence production creates a new kind of visual security paradox in which civilians can be endangered by their everyday visual practices because their digital images can be appropriated by outside actors as conflict intelligence. The transformation of everyday images into conflict evidence relies on what Barthes termed the photographic paradox, the paradox that while a photograph is clearly not the reality it depicts, the photograph is casually interpreted as a copy of that reality. When images are appropriated as conflict intelligence this photographic paradox translates into a security paradox. A visual security argument can be made without the intention or knowledge of the image producer, who then comes to perform the role on an intelligence agent. Yet civilians in warzones can hardly refrain from producing any images when they need to call attention to their plight, and to stay in contact with friends and relatives. The paradox, then, is that such vital visual signs of life can rapidly become sources of danger for the civilian. This civilian visual security paradox, it is argued, demands that intelligence actors respect the protected status of civilians in their online collection practices. So far, however, there is little sign of such respect.

COEXISTENCE OF PRIVATE FIRMS AND OPEN SOURCE FIRMS UNDER SPILLOVERS AND CONSUMER BIAS

Open source technologies have been an important divergence from the private produc- tion, and some markets have accommodated both open source firms and private firms. We explore the conditions under which such a coexistence of both type of firms can be seen. Through a simple and tractable game theoretical model, with spillovers on the open source production and positive consumer bias for the privately produced good, we analyze the conditions for which, in the equilibrium, a private firm and an open source firm share the market. We find that for large enough consumer bias, the two types cannot coexist, however when the consumer bias is relatively low and the spillover effect is not too strong, then we get a coexistence result.

Open source—Is it an alternative to intellectual property?

The open source production model is being articulated as an alternative to the contemporary intellectual property model, which uses property rights as instruments of exclusion and, consequently, guarantees a market monopoly. The open source movement initially originated as a creators’ response to the extensive use of intellectual property law to protect the source code of computer programs. Even though the movement began modestly, open source has now become a practicing business model. The efficiency of the open source production model in coordinating collaborative creativity and in providing concrete results is a proven fact in the software industry. The uniqueness of this model lies in its facilitation of a distinctive use of property to build an environment, that is more conducive to collaborative production. Many theorists argue that open source has now emerged as a workable alternative to current intellectual property law, and that it resolves the many challenges intellectual property law has posed in terms of access and creativity management. This note attempts to explore the property jurisprudence and social relationships in open source and critically examines how successful the open source model is in emerging as an alternative to intellectual property.

Is there a wage premium for volunteer OSS engagement? – signalling, learning and noise

ABSTRACTVolunteer-based open-source production has become a significant new model for the organization of software development. Economics often pictures this phenomenon as a case of signalling: individuals engage in the volunteer programming of open-source software (OSS) as a labour-market signal resulting in a wage premium. Yet, this explanation could so far not be empirically tested. This article fills this gap by estimating an upper-bound composite wage premium of voluntary OSS contributions and by separating the potential signalling effect of OSS engagement from other effects. Although some 70% of OSS contributors believe that OSS involvement benefits their careers, we find no actual labour-market premium for OSS engagement. The presence of other motives, such as fun of play or altruism, renders OSS contributions too noisy to function as a signal.

Open culture and innovation: integrating knowledge across boundaries

What does open source mean for culture? For knowledge? As cultural production has come to be characterized by contribution as well as consumption and as alternative modes of intellectual property transfer challenge the ‘dominant paradigm’ that knowledge and information should be protected and monetized, the logic of ‘open sourcing’ has extended into many cultural spheres. This article positions ‘openness’ as a value that intermediates between re-usable software code, institutional transparency, and expanded opportunities for participation in knowledge production cultures. By observing and analyzing the expansion of ‘openness’ from computer software to electronics hardware, we can develop a framework that identifies the tensions between socio-cultural visions of knowledge commons and the realities of governing those commons. This research focuses in particular on the knowledge related to electronics hardware and other material objects governed by open hardware licenses. The insights in this article are valuable for anyone studying open source and peer production processes and the knowledge claims surrounding them.

Crowd Sourcing - An Innovative Business Approach

Crowd sourcing is an evolving platform that is helping overcoming business problems faster, with better quality and at the least possible cost. It is emerging as a new on-line distributed network, where crowd of people join hands to complete a task. The scalable workforce is highly accessible; thereby enterprises are readily implicating the concept in their projects. No one knows everything, everyone knows something and all the knowledge resides in humanity. Crowd Wisdom reflects on the dramatic, economic, cultural and political implications of applying the open source idea to a variety of fields other than the IT sector and addresses the unique opportunities in building a new Business Model. This paper provides an insight to both theoretical and exemplar cases distinguishing it from open source production. The paper also sets possibilities to explore the potential of setting a business model, as a new trend setter by canvassing a large crowd of people with ideas, skills and participation. It also exploits crowd of innovators and the potential of using it beyond profit sectors.

A Unified Interdisciplinary Theory of Open Source Culture and Entertainment

Digital technologies are profoundly transforming the production and consumption of culture and entertainment products. The emerging digital re-mix culture is an open source approach where content products in the arts and entertainment industries are increasingly rearranged, manipulated, and extended in the process of creating new works. This article offers a unified description of the tools and techniques that led to the development of the open source culture and that enable the processes which promote re-use of previously recorded materials. It then lays out the incentives and forces that either promote or inhibit the development, distribution, and consumption of modified cultural content by individual consumers and by derivative artists. Using multiple perspectives from economics, design sciences, and arts and culture, new theory is built to suggest how ―rip, mix and burn‖ strategies based on re-use and recombination of content components can create significant economic value, stimulate artistic innovation, and spur creativity and growth in the culture and entertainment industry. The potential for wealth transfer and who loses and who gains in the open source digital re-mix culture are explored. The creative and economic forces enabled by digital re-use technologies are shown to play a significant role in the observed move towards more open source and social production modes in the culture industries. Five-mini case studies provide supporting perspectives for the proposed interdisciplinary theory of open source digital re-mix culture.

Material Matters: Lowering barriers to uptake, Diversifying range of application, Carrying forward legacy processes.

New production technologies and modes of enterprise based on proprietary and cost-effective, open-source production platforms are changing the nature of making. An exemplar of this change, 3D Printing has created a rapidly developing presence as an emergent production technology across many sectors. As this technology's development continues, artists and designers are no longer constrained by traditional models of form development and production: accessible 3D technology stands to markedly revise a broad range of legacy production practices.Material Matters - a research cluster within the Intersections Digital Studios of the Emily Carr University of Art and Design - is exploring these new digital technologies as a viable analogue to traditional methods and materials. As 3D printing becomes less expensive, more powerful and more pervasive it diffuses into a wider range of opportunities. As these new means of creative production emerge they intersect with established practice, Material Matters examines these points of contact with an emphasis on four interrelated components: material development and lateral application; and commercial application and partnership. This paper will highlight elements of these four streams.

At the boundaries of peer production: The organization of Internet security production in the cases of Estonia 2007 and Conficker

With the emergence of Internet based communication and collaboration, new forms of production have surfaced that are based on openness and non-proprietary resources. The paper analyses the role of open source and peer production elements in the response to the attacks on Estonian Internet services in 2007 and the Conficker botnet in 2008/2009.While both cases can not be classified as purely peer-produced security, the two cases of incident response examined here do show some of the characteristics of peer production. By applying certain institutional techniques, the communities balance their need for secrecy with their need to widely share information.The paper concludes with an explanatory model for the observed results. For appropriate policy outcomes, it suggests greater consideration of the role of social production by researchers and designers of the organisation of Internet security.

Input Domain Reduction through Irrelevant Variable Removal and Its Effect on Local, Global, and Hybrid Search-Based Structural Test Data Generation

Search-Based Test Data Generation reformulates testing goals as fitness functions so that test input generation can be automated by some chosen search-based optimization algorithm. The optimization algorithm searches the space of potential inputs, seeking those that are “fit for purpose,” guided by the fitness function. The search space of potential inputs can be very large, even for very small systems under test. Its size is, of course, a key determining factor affecting the performance of any search-based approach. However, despite the large volume of work on Search-Based Software Testing, the literature contains little that concerns the performance impact of search space reduction. This paper proposes a static dependence analysis derived from program slicing that can be used to support search space reduction. The paper presents both a theoretical and empirical analysis of the application of this approach to open source and industrial production code. The results provide evidence to support the claim that input domain reduction has a significant effect on the performance of local, global, and hybrid search, while a purely random search is unaffected.

The Implications of Incumbent Intellectual Property Strategies for Open Source Software Success and Commercialization

This dissertation investigates how IPR enforcement by proprietary incumbents influences open source software (OSS) adoption and production. It suggests user interest and developer activity on OSS are negatively affected by IPR enforcement particularly for OSS projects technologically overlap with litigated OSS and business projects specific to a litigated OSS platform. Second, it examines how royalty-free patent pools contributed by incumbents affect OSS product entry. It finds the pools related to a software segment will facilitate OSS start-up entry into the same segment; this marginal effect is especially large in segments with high cumulativeness of innovation or high patent ownership concentration.

A Sequential Linear Constraint Programming Algorithm for NLP

A new method for nonlinear programming (NLP) using sequential linear constraint programming (SLCP) is described. Linear constraint programming (LCP) subproblems are solved by a new code using a recently developed spectral gradient method for minimization. The method requires only first derivatives and avoids having to store and update approximate Hessian or reduced Hessian matrices. Globalization is provided by a trust region filter scheme. Open source production quality software is available. Results on a large selection of CUTEr test problems are presented and discussed and show that the method is reliable and reasonably efficient.

Open Source Production of Encyclopedias: Editorial Policies at the Intersection of Organizational and Epistemological Trust

The ideas behind open source software are currently applied to the production of encyclopedias. A sample of six English text-based, neutral-point-of-view, online encyclopedias of the kind are identified: h2g2, Wikipedia, Scholarpedia, Encyclopedia of Earth, Citizendium and Knol. How do these projects deal with the problem of trusting their participants to behave as competent and loyal encyclopedists? Editorial policies for soliciting and processing content are shown to range from high discretion to low discretion; that is, from granting unlimited trust to limited trust. Their conceptions of the proper role for experts are also explored and it is argued that to a great extent they determine editorial policies. Subsequently, internal discussions about quality guarantee at Wikipedia are rendered. All indications are that review and “super-review” of new edits will become policy, to be performed by Wikipedians with a better reputation. Finally, while for encyclopedias the issue of organizational trust largely coincides with epistemological trust, a link is made with theories about the acceptance of testimony. It is argued that both non-reductionist views (the “acceptance principle” and the “assurance view”) and reductionist ones (an appeal to background conditions, and a—newly defined—“expertise view”) have been implemented in editorial strategies over the past decade.

Ethics and value in customer co-production

This article will make one argument and one suggestion. The first part will argue that practices of customer co-production raise a serious challenge to established theories of value. The second part will suggest that these new practices, although widely disparate in nature, do move according to a common logic of value, and that this new value logic can be fruitfully organized around the concept of ‘ethics’. Let me clarify already here that I intend ‘ethics’ in the sense of the ability to create the values that ‘make a multitude into a community’ (Marazzi, 2008: 66). As I will further elaborate below, this concept of ethics is closer to the original Aristotelian sense of that term, than to the Kantian ethics that has been central to modern, enlightenment discourse. My use of ‘ethics’, in this, Aristotelian sense, is not taken out of the blue. Rather, I propose that a notion of value based on ethics is already emerging within a range of cutting-edge economic practices involving aspects of customer co-production — from corporate social responsibility (CSR) to Open Source production and brand valuation. In other words, I am not proposing a new notion of value as I would like it to be, but I am pointing at actually existing trends and developments. However, since these developments are emergent they cannot be grasped as fully formed facts. My ambition in the second part of this paper is thus limited to suggesting a theoretical framework within which these emergent tendencies can be read in a novel way; and from which a more definite shape can be discerned.

FlagRemover

Search-Based Testing is a widely studied technique for automatically generating test inputs, with the aim of reducing the cost of software engineering activities that rely upon testing. However, search-based approaches degenerate to random testing in the presence of flag variables, because flags create spikes and plateaux in the fitness landscape. Both these features are known to denote hard optimization problems for all search-based optimization techniques. Several authors have studied flag removal transformations and fitness function refinements to address the issue of flags, but the problem of loop-assigned flags remains unsolved. This article introduces a testability transformation along with a tool that transforms programs with loop-assigned flags into flag-free equivalents, so that existing search-based test data generation approaches can successfully be applied. The article presents the results of an empirical study that demonstrates the effectiveness and efficiency of the testability transformation on programs including those made up of open source and industrial production code, as well as test data generation problems specifically created to denote hard optimization problems.

An interactive reading environment for online scholarly journals: The Open Journal Systems Reading Tools

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of a set of reader‐oriented tools developed as part of an open source journal production and access system.Design/methodology/approach – The paper outlines key elements of the reading tools component of Open Journal Systems (OJS). A design rationale is provided, and related to the key elements of the system. The philosophy behind the development of the reading tools is described, and relevant published research in support of the design is presented.Findings – OJS (http://pkp.sfu.ca/ojs) is a web‐based, open source editing, management, and production application designed for publication of scholarly journals online. The reading tools developed for OJS are a useful addition to the feature set of OJS, providing journal readers with a richer reading environment, promote active reading, and increase the level of critical engagement with journal article content.Practical implications – Readers may find that the tools described, as well as the larger ...

Reputation and Reliability in Collective Goods

An important organizational innovation enabled by the revolution in information technologies is `open source' production which converts private commodities into essentially public goods. Similar to other public goods, incentives for reputation and group identity appear to motivate contributions to open source projects, overcoming the social dilemma inherent in producing such goods. In this paper we examine how contributor motivations affect the type of contributions made to the open source online encyclopedia Wikipedia. As expected, we find that registered participants, motivated by reputation and commitment to the Wikipedia community, make many contributions with high reliability. Surprisingly, however, we find the highest reliability from the vast numbers of anonymous `Good Samaritans' who contribute only once. Our findings of high reliability in the contributions of both Good Samaritans and committed `zealots' suggest that open source production succeeds by altering the scope of production such that a critical mass of contributors can participate.