Aligning Information Processing Capabilities and Gaps in Open Source Software Development
Aron Lindberg, Nicholas Berente · Academy of Management Proceedings · 2014
Distributed, high-turnover communities of developers assemble Open Source Software (OSS), each working essentially alone. Despite these characteristics, these communities manage to coordinate effectively and create complex, working code artifacts. We propose that information processing capabilities – aggregated routines, with measurable procedural structures, serve as coordinating mechanisms for OSS developers. In this paper we develop a “distributed information processing view” suited to OSS contexts and propose the notions of manifest and latent information processing “gaps.” Stemming from different configurations of such gaps, we identify four types of information processing routines in OSS: discrete, aborted, technical inquiry, and social negotiation. By applying these concepts to a multi-method case study, we show how developers align information processing gaps and routines so as to form an array of information processing capabilities with certain procedural structure properties, and then draw upon these in the course of writing code – thus achieving effective coordination.