How participative is open source hardware? Insights from online repository mining. (21st November 2018)
- Record Type:
- Journal Article
- Title:
- How participative is open source hardware? Insights from online repository mining. (21st November 2018)
- Main Title:
- How participative is open source hardware? Insights from online repository mining
- Authors:
- Bonvoisin, Jérémy
Buchert, Tom
Preidel, Maurice
Stark, Rainer G. - Abstract:
- Abstract : Open Source Hardware (OSH) is an increasingly viable approach to intellectual property management extending the principles of Open Source Software (OSS) to the domain of physical products. These principles support the development of products in transparent processes allowing the participation of any interested person. While increasing numbers of products have been released as OSH, little is known on the prevalence of participative development practices in this emerging field. It remains unclear to which extent the transparent and participatory processes known from software reached hardware product development. To fill this gap, this paper applies repository mining techniques to investigate the transparency and workload distribution of 105 OSH product development projects. The results highlight a certain heterogeneity of practices filling a continuum between public and private development settings. They reveal different organizational patterns with different levels of centralization and distribution. Nonetheless, they clearly indicate the expansion of the open source development model from software into the realms of physical products and provide the first large-scale empirical evidence of this recent evolution. Therewith, this article gives body to an emerging phenomenon and contributes to give it a place in the scientific debate. It delivers categories to delineate practices, techniques to investigate them in further detail as well as a large dataset of exemplaryAbstract : Open Source Hardware (OSH) is an increasingly viable approach to intellectual property management extending the principles of Open Source Software (OSS) to the domain of physical products. These principles support the development of products in transparent processes allowing the participation of any interested person. While increasing numbers of products have been released as OSH, little is known on the prevalence of participative development practices in this emerging field. It remains unclear to which extent the transparent and participatory processes known from software reached hardware product development. To fill this gap, this paper applies repository mining techniques to investigate the transparency and workload distribution of 105 OSH product development projects. The results highlight a certain heterogeneity of practices filling a continuum between public and private development settings. They reveal different organizational patterns with different levels of centralization and distribution. Nonetheless, they clearly indicate the expansion of the open source development model from software into the realms of physical products and provide the first large-scale empirical evidence of this recent evolution. Therewith, this article gives body to an emerging phenomenon and contributes to give it a place in the scientific debate. It delivers categories to delineate practices, techniques to investigate them in further detail as well as a large dataset of exemplary OSH projects. The discussion of first results signposts avenues for a stream of research aiming at understanding stakeholder interactions at work in new product innovation practices in order to enable institutions and industry in providing appropriate responses. … (more)
- Is Part Of:
- Design science. Volume 4(2018)
- Journal:
- Design science
- Issue:
- Volume 4(2018)
- Issue Display:
- Volume 4, Issue 2018 (2018)
- Year:
- 2018
- Volume:
- 4
- Issue:
- 2018
- Issue Sort Value:
- 2018-0004-2018-0000
- Page Start:
- Page End:
- Publication Date:
- 2018-11-21
- Subjects:
- open source hardware, -- open source innovation, -- open design, -- open innovation, -- repository mining, -- social network analysis, -- community-based product development, -- Git, -- GitHub
Design -- Research -- Periodicals
New products -- Management -- Periodicals
Design
Design -- Research
Electronic journals
Periodicals
658.5752 - Journal URLs:
- http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayJournal?jid=DSJ ↗
http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayBackIssues?jid=DSJ&tab=backissue ↗ - DOI:
- 10.1017/dsj.2018.15 ↗
- Languages:
- English
- ISSNs:
- 2053-4701
- Deposit Type:
- Legaldeposit
- View Content:
- Available online (eLD content is only available in our Reading Rooms) ↗
- Physical Locations:
- British Library HMNTS - ELD Digital store
- Ingest File:
- 14558.xml