We examine how a diverse global readership assigns trust to Wikipedia articles, and the strategies they use to assess Wikipedia’s credibility. Through surveys and interviews, we develop and refine a Wikipedia trust taxonomy that describes the mechanisms by which readers assess the credibility of Wikipedia articles. Our findings suggest that readers draw on direct experience, established online content credibility indicators, and their own mental models of Wikipedia’s editorial process in their credibility assessments. Our findings can help the development of general online information assessment frameworks and the design of open collaboration systems to support credibility evaluation and trust calibration.
This article studies open-source 3D printer manufacturers’ business models, as well as the strategies into which these models fit. To do so, we use the concepts of business model innovation and specific capabilities. The analysis of the particularities of the projects and of the associated companies reveals two “pure” open-hardware strategies, the first one based on the temporary exploitation of the free/libre/open hardware community as a complementary resources, the second one based on the construction of a sustainable collaborative activity in order to maintain dynamic capabilities that are hard to imitate.
Block-based languages have been used as a facilitator to teach programming to newcomer and end-user programming students. Another alternative is to abstract the programming domain by using educational robots. Such approaches face some challenges. Block-based languages are far different than conventional programming languages, resulting in an abrupt transition between the two paradigms. On the other hand, commercial educational robots are limited to predesigned projects, which bounds students' creativity. In this work, we propose an intermediate language (between blocks and traditional language that focuses on Arduino, allowing a wide range and student-designed projects. Preliminary results show that our language is simpler than the native Arduino language and that it would be a preferred alternative for beginner students of a computer science undergraduate course.
Motion Capture systems are crucial in many fields, and Mobile Robotics is one of them. This paper describes an Open Source robotic framework to standardize the use of motion capture systems called MOCAP4ROS2. This framework features a layered architecture that allows building applications that use Motion Capture systems regardless of the specific system model/vendor. The challenges are technical and social: on the one hand, resolving synchronization and representation issues; on the other hand, involving the community to reach a consensus on the necessary interfaces. MOCAP4ROS2 has been implemented in ROS2 and already has drivers (we understand a driver for MOCA4ROS2 as a ROS2 node that publish the MOCAP system information) for today’s main commercial systems.
In this paper, we will focus on improving the quality of open data offered through open data portals by engaging with citizens using open source tools. To do so, we will evaluate current open source solutions from the data engineering field, selecting those better suited towards collaborative workflows. We will propose a methodology to evaluate errors in open datasets and notify public administrations, resulting in better overall quality and more trustworthy and transparent processes.
Non-profit organisations (NPOs) are one type of open data intermediaries connecting different actors in the open data ecosystem. They perform a number of activities, from requesting the government to open up the data to application development. Such activities can have an effect on open data usability barriers that other actors in the open data ecosystem encounter. The objective of this study is to systematically review the literature on the influence of NPOs' activities on the usability barriers for open data users in the open data ecosystem. The authors identified and analysed fourteen relevant papers. This study shows that NPOs conduct various activities that relate to different intermediary roles in the open data ecosystem, which in turn can affect certain usability barriers. Moreover, NPOs may perform different activities depending on the type of open data they work with. However, the connection between the activities and open data usability barriers for open data users cannot be clearly established from the selected articles, as most of them do not focus on establishing such a link. This review highlights a literature gap in relation to NPOs' activities and their effects on open data usability.
Open hardware and open source software platforms bring benefits to both implementers and users in the form of system adaptability and maintainability, and through the avoidance of lock-in, for example. Development of the RISC-V Instruction Set Architecture and processors during the last ten years has made the implementation of a desktop computer using open hardware, including open processors, and open source software an approaching possibility. We use the SiFive Unmatched development board and Ubuntu Linux, and the recorded experiences of system builders using the Unmatched board to explore the extent to which it is possible to create an open desktop computer. The work identifies current limitations to implementing an open computer system, which lie mainly at the interface between the operating system and hardware components. Potential solutions to the challenges uncovered are proposed, including greater consideration of openness during the early stages of product design. A further contribution is made by an account of the synergies arising from open collaboration in a private-collective innovation process.
ACM Reference Format: Jonas Gamalielsson, Björn Lundell, Simon Butler, Christoffer Brax, Tomas Persson, Anders Mattsson, Tomas Gustavsson, Jonas Feist, and Jonas Öberg. 2022. On Engagement with Open Source Software, Open Source Hardware, and Standard Setting: The Case of White Rabbit. In The 18th International Symposium on Open Collaboration (OpenSym 2022), September 7–9, 2022, Madrid, Spain. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 2 pages. https: //doi.org/10.1145/3555051.3555072
Open Science can be seen as a movement that has been spread out by the scientific community of all areas. In this movement, practices that seek to facilitate the sharing of research artifacts are considered. Possible artifacts include articles, data, scripts, and processes. In this paper, we present and discuss the results of a survey on open science carried out in the context of the State University of Maringá (UEM) in Brazil. Such a survey is aimed at investigating the degree of knowledge about open science from lecturers who supervise Master’s degree students and PhD candidates. The university has currently 54 graduate programs, distributed in different centers, encompassing almost 900 lecturers. We collected data using a web questionnaire with 22 questions. In total, 90 lecturers answered our survey. Results show that a significant subset of respondents never heard about open science, whereas the complementary subset barely dealt with the open science principles, tools or license types. We then provide in this paper a set of assumptions on several open science-related subjects. In addition, this paper might be used to guide any other university to measure the degree level of open science knowledge and to provide a plan to inspire the institutionalization of such an extremely relevant scientific topic.
Motivation. Digital commons is an emerging phenomenon and of increasing importance, as we enter a digital society. Open data is one example that makes up a pivotal input and foundation for many of today’s digital services and applications. Ensuring sustainable provisioning and maintenance of the data, therefore, becomes even more important. Aim. We aim to investigate how such provisioning and maintenance can be collaboratively performed in the community surrounding a common. Specifically, we look at Open Data Ecosystems (ODEs), a type of community of actors, openly sharing and evolving data on a technological platform. Method. We use Elinor Ostrom’s design principles for Common Pool Resources as a lens to systematically analyze the governance of earlier reported cases of ODEs using a theory-oriented software engineering framework. Results. We find that, while natural commons must regulate consumption, digital commons such as open data maintained by an ODE must stimulate both use and data provisioning. Governance needs to enable such stimulus while also ensuring that the collective action can still be coordinated and managed within the frame of available maintenance resources of a community. Subtractability is, in this sense, a concern regarding the resources required to maintain the quality and value of the data, rather than the availability of data. Further, we derive empirically-based recommended practices for ODEs based on the design principles by Ostrom for how to design a governance structure in a way that enables a sustainable and collaborative provisioning and maintenance of the data. Conclusion. ODEs are expected to play a role in data provisioning which democratize the digital society and enables innovation from smaller commercial actors. Our empirically based guidelines intend to support this development.
Motivation: Society's dependence on Open Source Software (OSS) and the communities that maintain the OSS is ever-growing. So are the potential risks of, e.g., vulnerabilities being introduced in projects not actively maintained. By assessing an OSS project's capability to stay viable and maintained over time without interruption or weakening, i.e., the OSS health, users can consider the risk implied by using the OSS as is, and if necessary, decide whether to help improve the health or choose another option. However, such assessment is complex as OSS health covers a wide range of sub-topics, and existing support is limited. Aim: We aim to create an overview of characteristics that affect the health of an OSS project and enable the assessment thereof. Method: We conduct a snowball literature review based on a start set of 9 papers, and identify 146 relevant papers over two iterations of forward and backward snowballing. Health characteristics are elicited and coded using structured and axial coding into a framework structure. Results: The final framework consists of 107 health characteristics divided among 15 themes. Characteristics address the socio-technical spectrum of the community of actors maintaining the OSS project, the software and other deliverables being maintained, and the orchestration facilitating the maintenance. Characteristics are further divided based on the level of abstraction they address, i.e., the OSS project-level specifically, or the project's overarching ecosystem of related OSS projects. Conclusion: The framework provides an overview of the wide span of health characteristics that may need to be considered when evaluating OSS health and can serve as a foundation both for research and practice.
Free/Open Source Software (FOSS) enables large-scale reuse of preexisting software components. The main drawback is increased complexity in software supply chain management. A common approach to tame such complexity is automated open source compliance, which consists in automating the verification of adherence to various open source management best practices about license obligation fulfillment, vulnerability tracking, software composition analysis, and nearby concerns. We consider the problem of auditing a source code base to determine which of its parts have been published before, which is an important building block of automated open source compliance toolchains. Indeed, if source code allegedly developed in house is recognized as having been previously published elsewhere, alerts should be raised to investigate where it comes from and whether this entails that additional obligations shall be fulfilled before product shipment. We propose an efficient approach for prior publication identification that relies on a knowledge base of known source code artifacts linked together in a global Merkle direct acyclic graph and a dedicated discovery protocol. We introduce swh-scanner, a source code scanner that realizes the proposed approach in practice using as knowledge base Software Heritage, the largest public archive of source code artifacts. We validate experimentally the proposed approach, showing its efficiency in both abstract (number of queries) and concrete terms (wall-clock time), performing benchmarks on 16845 real-world public code bases of various sizes, from small to very large.
COVID-19 has highlighted the importance of digital in the fight against the pandemic (control at the border, automated tracing, creation of databases...). In this research, we analyze the Belgian response in terms of open data. First, we examine the open data publication strategy in Belgium (a federal state with a sometimes complex functioning, especially in health), second, we conduct a case study (anatomy of the pandemic in Belgium) in order to better understand the strengths and weaknesses of the main COVID-19 open data repository. And third, we analyze the obstacles to open data publication. Finally, we discuss the Belgian COVID-19 open data strategy in terms of data availability, data relevance and knowledge management. In particular, we show how difficult it is to optimize the latter in order to make the best use of governmental, private and academic open data in a way that has a positive impact on public health policy.
Openness as organizational philosophy and theoretical concept has continuously gained importance over the past decades. While the adoption of open practices such as open-source development or crowdsourcing is primarily academically observed in the 20th and 21st century, organizational practices adopting or facilitating openness have already been applied before there was an understanding what openness actually depicts. For centuries, public and private stakeholders utilized a broad variety of open practices such as open science, industrial exhibitions, solution sourcing or industrial democracy in order to achieve certain anticipated effects – fully in the absence of IT. Due to the missing historical understanding, this paper provides a first holistic historical perspective on the emergence of open practices, considering the context of the political, technological and societal developments. Utilizing a structured literature review, the paper puts a special focus on the historical narrative and the connection between openness without and with IT. The paper concludes that open practices are not a recent phenomenon, but were already applied successfully by affected stakeholders in previous centuries, whereas applied open practices partly build upon each other and show resembling patterns. Historically, two central shifts are identified: (1) a shift from government-driven towards organization- and community-driven open practices, and (2) a shift from mainly transparency-oriented open practices towards a stronger utilization of inclusion.
Wikipedia is a free, multilingual, and collaborative online encyclopedia. Nowadays, it is one of the largest sources of online knowledge, often appearing at the top of the results of the major search engines, being one of the most sought-after resources by the public searching for health information. The collaborative nature of Wikipedia raises security concerns since this information is used for decision-making, especially in the health area. Despite being available in hundreds of idioms, there are asymmetries between idioms, namely regarding their quality. In this work, we compare the quality of health information on Wikipedia between idioms with 100 million native speakers or more, and also in Greek, Italian, Korean, Turkish, Persian, Catalan and Hebrew, for historical tradition. Quality metrics are applied to health and medical articles in English, maintained by WikiProject Medicine, and their versions in the above idioms. With this, we contribute to a clarification of the role of Wikipedia in the access to health information. We demonstrate differences in both the quantity and quality of information available between idioms. English is the idiom with the highest quality in general. Urdu, Greek, Indonesian, and Hindi achieved lower values of quality.
The Open Innovation paradigm has spread widely since 2003, and led to the emergence of Open Innovation Platforms as software systems aiming at supporting and facilitating open innovation initiatives and projects. This software domain has matured up to a point where many functional concepts became notably common and used in these platforms. When implementing open innovation platforms, related people often struggle when defining expected functional characteristics due to the general application of the paradigm, making necessary the existence of a model that provide a set of potential functional features expected in the creation and development of this type of platform. Reference models provides a domain-specific set of clearly defined entities aiming at encouraging better communication in the domain. We propose in this paper a reference model for capturing and defining the functional features that could be implemented in outside-in oriented open innovation platforms. For building this reference model, we reviewed some of the already published reports of open innovation platforms implementations in order determine and define the potential functional features expected in this kind of platforms. We believe this knowledge base could ease software development and deployment decisions, especially at early stages where open innovation platforms adopters face development in a domain that as of this writing is still new to many people.
Compared to Wikipedia, Wikidata is a single domain website with the possibility to view information in multiple languages. Translation plays a significant role in Wikidata. Unlike Wikidata items, Wikidata properties are influenced less by translation bots and require a meaningful amount of human effort. The study of Wikidata property creation and translation is, therefore, very essential. Since the inception of Wikipedia, several research works have focused on the information flow among different language Wikipedias. The attention has now shifted to the way information on Wikidata is created and translated. The focus of this article is the Wikidata properties. WDProp is a web application created to understand and obtain an integrated view on the various multilingual aspects of Wikidata properties, from their proposition to their use on multiple domains.
Cross-Classroom Collaborative Project-Based Learning (C3PjBL) requires the formation of project-groups by pairing student-groups across classrooms. Unfortunately, due to the configuration of these groups, the group formation techniques found in the literature are unable to automatically create project-groups for C3PjBL. This paper describes an automatic project-group formation technique for C3PjBL which utilizes clustering to create homogeneous student-groups, based on the students’ perceived technological and higher-order thinking skills (student characteristics). Student-groups, from different classrooms, are then paired using an optimization technique to form project-groups. In our results, we present a comparison of the performance of a random group formation technique and our technique. We observed that automatic group formation using an n-dimensional space of student characteristics and k-means clustering is more effective than random group formation and, the strategy of forming homogeneous student-groups and heterogeneous project-group for C3PjBL creates more compatible group compositions than random grouping.
Today, digital platforms are increasingly mediating our day-to-day work and crowdsourced forms of labour are progressively gaining importance (e.g. Amazon Mechanical Turk, Universal Human Relevance System, TaskRabbit). In many popular cases of crowdsourcing, a volatile, diverse, and globally distributed crowd of workers compete among themselves to find their next paid task. The logic behind the allocation of these tasks typically operates on a “First-Come, First-Served” basis. This logic generates a competitive dynamic in which workers are constantly forced to check for new tasks. This article draws on findings from ongoing collaborative research in which we co-design, with crowdsourcing workers, three alternative models of task allocation beyond “First-Come, First-Served”, namely (1) round-robin, (2) reputation-based, and (3) content-based. We argue that these models could create fairer and more collaborative forms of crowd labour. We draw on Amara On Demand, a remuneration-based crowdsourcing platform for video subtitling and translation, as the case study for this research. Using a multi-modal qualitative approach that combines data from 10 months of participant observation, 25 semi-structured interviews, two focus groups, and documentary analysis, we observed and co-designed alternative forms of task allocation in Amara on Demand. The identified models help envision alternatives towards more worker-centric crowdsourcing platforms, understanding that platforms depend on their workers, and thus ultimately they should hold power within them.
Wikipedia is one of the most important sources of encyclopedic knowledge and among the most visited websites on the internet. As a peer-produced knowledge repository, Wikipedia is dependent on its community of contributors. A healthy contributor community and a steady stream of new editors from diverse backgrounds are especially vital for the platform’s future in its endeavour of closing knowledge gaps and combating biases and a lack of diversity that Wikipedia suffers from. Edit-a-thons are social activities aiming to improve content and create new articles on Wikipedia with the purpose of recruitment and onboarding of newcomers. Although edit-a-thons have been facilitated and hosted for many years now, little is known how editors experience such events. In this paper, we study editors experience during a virtual edit-a-thon by applying an ethnomethodological perspective. We use a participatory observation to study incidents of motivation and frustration occurring during the collaborative online writing event. Moreover, we use Hofstede’s 6D Model of National Culture to explore what influence culture has on participants’ actions, expressed feelings and thoughts while interacting with the administrator and with each other. Our findings indicate that the type of motivational factors is very diverse and varies from general motivation to fill in knowledge gaps, in the beginning, to share good resources for citations at later stages of the edit-a-thon. However, participants also experience moments of frustration, especially concerning the usability of the editing interface and when navigating a complex bureaucracy of policies and procedures. Finally, our analysis shows that cultural idiosyncrasies can intensify the frustrating experience of social challenges.
