Crowdsourcing is an online, distributed problem-solving and production model that has emerged in recent years. Notable examples of the model include Threadless, iStockphoto, InnoCentive, the Goldcorp Challenge, and user-generated advertising contests. This article provides an introduction to crowdsourcing, both its theoretical grounding and exemplar cases, taking care to distinguish crowdsourcing from open source production. This article also explores the possibilities for the model, its potential to exploit a crowd of innovators, and its potential for use beyond forprofit sectors. Finally, this article proposes an agenda for research into crowdsourcing.

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Crowdsourcing as a Model for Problem Solving : An Introduction and Cases

This chapter contains sections titled: Understanding Motivations of F/OSS Developers, Study Design and Sample Characteristics, Payment Status and Effort in Projects, Creativity and Motivation in Projects, Determinants of Effort, Discussion, Notes

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Why Hackers Do What They Do: Understanding Motivation and Effort in Free/Open Source Software Projects

We conceptualize participation in Linux user groups (LUGs) in terms of group-referent intentional actions and investigate cognitive (attitudes, perceived behavioral control, identification with the open source movement), affective (positive and negative anticipated emotions), and social (social identity) determinants of participation and its consequences on Linux-related behaviors of users. This survey-based study, conducted with 402 active LUG members representing 191 different LUGs from 23 countries and employing structural equation modeling methodology, supports the proposed model. Furthermore, we find that the Linux user's experience level moderates the extent of the LUG's social influence and its impact on the user's participation. We conclude with a consideration of the managerial and research implications of the study's findings.

Open Source Software User Communities: A Study of Participation in Linux User Groups

In Two Bits, Christopher M. Kelty investigates the history and cultural significance of Free Software, revealing the people and practices that have transformed not only software but also music, film, science, and education. Free Software is a set of practices devoted to the collaborative creation of software source code that is made openly and freely available through an unconventional use of copyright law. Kelty explains how these specific practices have reoriented the relations of power around the creation, dissemination, and authorization of all kinds of knowledge. He also makes an important contribution to discussions of public spheres and social imaginaries by demonstrating how Free Software is a recursive publica public organized around the ability to build, modify, and maintain the very infrastructure that gives it life in the first place.Drawing on ethnographic research that took him from an Internet healthcare start-up company in Boston to media labs in Berlin to young entrepreneurs in Bangalore, Kelty describes the technologies and the moral vision that bind together hackers, geeks, lawyers, and other Free Software advocates. In each case, he shows how their practices and way of life include not only the sharing of software source code but also ways of conceptualizing openness, writing copyright licenses, coordinating collaboration, and proselytizing. By exploring in detail how these practices came together as the Free Software movement from the 1970s to the 1990s, Kelty also considers how it is possible to understand the new movements emerging from Free Software: projects such as Creative Commons, a nonprofit organization that creates copyright licenses, and Connexions, a project to create an online scholarly textbook commons.

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Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software

Open source software (OSS) is a social and economic phenomenon that raises fundamental questions about the motivations of contributors to information systems development. Some developers are unpaid volunteers who seek to solve their own technical problems, while others create OSS as part of their employment contract. For the past 10 years, a substantial amount of academic work has theorized about and empirically examined developer motivations. We review this work and suggest considering motivation in terms of the values of the social practice in which developers participate. Based on the social philosophy of Alasdair MacIntyre, we construct a theoretical framework that expands our assumptions about individual motivation to include the idea of a long-term, value-informed quest beyond short-term rewards. This motivation-practice framework depicts how the social practice and its supporting institutions mediate between individual motivation and outcome. The framework contains three theoretical conjectures that seek to explain how collectively elaborated standards of excellence prompt developers to produce high-quality software, change institutions, and sustain OSS development. From the framework, we derive six concrete propositions and suggest a new research agenda on motivation in OSS.

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Carrots and rainbows: motivation and social practice in open source software development

From the Publisher:
Nearly a century ago, Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism articulated the animating spirit of the industrial age, the Protestant ethic. Now, Pekka Himanen-together with Linus Torvalds and Manuel Castells-articulates how hackers* represent a new, opposing ethos for the information age. Underlying hackers' technical creations-such as the Internet and the personal computer, which have become symbols of our time-are the hacker values that produced them and that challenge us all.
These values promote passionate and freely rhythmed work; the belief that individuals can create great things by joining forces in imaginative ways; and the need to maintain our existing ethical ideals, such as privacy and equality, in our new, increasingly technologized society. The Hacker Ethic takes us on a journey through fundamental questions about life in the information age-a trip of constant surprises, after which our time and our lives can be seen from unexpected perspectives.
*In the original meaning of the word, hackers are enthusiastic computer programmers who share their work with others; they are not computer criminals.

The Hacker Ethic and the Spirit of the Information Age

The information society and the welfare state

At the heart of our technological age are people who call themselves hackers. Define themselves as people who are dedicated to program so passionate and believe that it is a duty for them to share information and develop free software. We must not confuse them with crackers, destructive users whose aim is to create virus and introduced in other systems: a hacker is an expert or enthusiast of any kind which may engage or not to computing. In this sense, the hacker ethic is a moral challenge to the protestant ethic of work, as Max Weber described it in his classic, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, which is based on diligent work, the acceptance of routine, the value of money and concern for the income. Confronting this morality, the ethic of work for the hacker is based on the value of creativity, passion and freedom. Money ceases to be a value in itself and the benefit is estimated at targets such as the social value and free access, transparency and openness. This book is an invitation to explore the fundamental questions about life in the information society, to undertake a journey full of surprises that will help us steer our lives into new and exciting prospects.

La ética del hacker y el espíritu de la era de la información

Introduction PART I: ANALYTICAL FRAMEWORK 1. Models of Development in the Global Information Age: Constructing an Analytical Framework PART II: CASE STUDIES 2. The Silicon Valley Model: Economic Dynamism, Social Exclusion 3. Reconstructing the Finnish Model 2.0: Building a Sustainable Development Model? 4. Toward a Welfare State 2.0: Crisis and Renewal of the European Welfare State? 5. Development as Culture: Human Development and Information Development in China 6. South Africa Informational Development and Human Development: Rights vs. Capabilities 7. Development, Democracy, and Social Change in Chile 8. Pacifism, Human Development, and Informational Development: The Costa Rican Model PART III: RECONCEPTUALIZING DEVELOPMENT 9. Rethinking Human Development 10. Dignity as Development: The Cultural Link Between Informational and Human Development

Pekka Himanen

Papers

The Hacker Ethic and the Spirit of the Information Age

The information society and the welfare state

La ética del hacker y el espíritu de la era de la información

Reconceptualizing development in the global information age

The Finnish Model of the Information Society