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→Free and Open Source Strategy as Practice: Participant Perspectives - Mekki MacAulay
==Free and Open Source Strategy as Practice: Participant Perspectives - Mekki MacAulay==
One of the presentations I attended on Friday was a presentation held by Mekki MacAulay. Mekki is a PhD candidate studying at the Schulich School of Business. The reason why I chose this talk to cover was due to the nature of the presentation. Many of the presentations during FSOSS were about a particular projectthe speaker was on, and those presentations discussed specifically more often than not spoke about that project and the things that affected the projectand focused less on the open source technologies that enabled their project to, in most cases, thrive. In terms of scope, they were very localized. Not that there is anything wrong with that, but because of the larger impact Mekki's research can have, as well as my background in studying the humanities, I felt really drawn by the presentation.
The presentation revolved around the study of various open source practices that may either help or hinder a group's growth. The study was still a work in progress, however, the amount of research and the correlations that resulted from the in-depth interviews he conducted were fascinating to me. The purpose of the study was to analyze the practices of open source communities and to see how the different types of practices affect the functioning of the community. Mekki mapped the various routines that occurred in multiple open source communities (given to him via interviews with members of various involvement) to four categories. Practices were considered an enabling practice if the action was considered a positive interaction and motivating for the person and a disabling practice if it had the opposite effect (these two categories were from the research by Mantere). As well, if the practice was codified it was considered to be a recursive practice; whereas the opposite would be classified as an adaptive practice. After categorizing the practices, Mekki found that things weren't as simple as "recursive practices are disabling" and "adaptive practices are enabling." The results showed that recursive practices had instances that were considered enabling, and adaptive practices that were considered disabling. Further analysis showed that the stage of the open source community (well established or fairly new) had an effect on whether or not a recursive practice was seen as enabling or disabling. The same applied for adaptive. I found this fascinating, because the projects that were offered to us had communities that ranged from recent (paladin/gladius) to fairly mature (processing.js).
