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The purpose of this paper is to critically examine the often complex and contradictory argumentation of a spectrum of different Finnish public sector actors interviewed on the topical issue of Free/Libre Open Source (FLOSS) adoption.

The science and technology‐inspired critical discourse‐analytical approach combines insights from Billig et al. and Fairclough, with a special focus on dilemmatic aspects of socially embedded discourses. The vocabularies used to justify FLOSS implementation highlight power struggles on the level of speech.

The identified dilemmatic discourses express the continuing tension between the freedom to choose, use and develop one's desktop in the spirit of FLOSS on the one hand, and the striving for better desktop control and maintenance by it staff and user advocates on the other.

The research acts as an opening for reframing common and axiomatic knowledge on FLOSS tools.

The asymmetry between the layperson (the ordinary user) and the expert (IT staff) manifests itself in discourse in a way that calls for critical re‐evaluation of the language used in information communication technology (ICT) implementation and support. It also questions the role of pilots in ICT implementation.

The paper critically examines the often taken‐for‐granted ideals of open source software and elaborates a methodological tool for spotting power struggles on the level of speech.

In this paper the authors aim to investigate the importance of factors for the adoption of free/libre open source software (FLOSS) in the public sector. They seek to evaluate how different factors impact during the initiation and implementation phases of the adoption process.

The authors base the methodological approach on two exploratory case studies with a contrasting result logic. They build a multi‐level framework grounded both on literature review, and feedback from stakeholders. They then apply the framework to two case studies to better frame the findings. They consider phases of adoption (initiation, implementation) and the levels of adoption (technological, organizational, environmental, individual).

In the case studies, the authors found the importance of a strong and decision‐centric management board to give the impulse for the initiation phase of the process. As perceived by the stakeholders, a strong governmental support is of paramount importance to increase the adoption at the public level, although in the case studies examined the initiation stage started from the impulse of a championing management. Both case studies passed the initiation phase successfully. Continuous employees' training, organizational objectives consensus, and business process reengineering have been found important for the implementation phase. In the case study in which these factors were not in place, the implementation phase of adoption failed. Environmental factors – although relevant for the initiation of the adoption process – are less significant during the actual implementation of the adoption process, as the contrasting result logic from the case studies shows.

The study refers to two public organizations in a specific environmental setting. No causality among factors has been inferred. Quantitative objective data have been used to determine the success of adoption, for qualitative data multiple sources have been used when possible to limit threats to validity.

The framework can be used by stakeholders in public organizations to better frame their adoption strategies and to compare results across institutions. Lessons learnt from the case studies can be useful to drive future adoptions of FLOSS.

The framework combines phases of adoption and levels making it possible to frame the analysis of the case studies. It has been operationalized with a set of metrics, and with a protocol for the case studies to increase replicability value.

This paper explores how task characteristics in terms of trigger type and task topic influence individual participation in community-based free/libre open source software (FLOSS) development by considering participation in individual tasks rather than entire projects.

A quantitative study was designed using choose tasks that were carried out via the email discourse on the developers' email fora in five FLOSS projects. Choice process episodes were selected as the unit of analysis and were coded for the task trigger and topic. The impact of these factors on participation (i.e. the numbers of participants and messages) was assessed by regression.

The results reveal differences in participation related to different task triggers and task topics. Further, the results suggest the mediating role of the number of participants in the relationships between task characteristics and the number of messages. The authors also speculate that project type serves as a boundary condition restricting the impacts of task characteristics on the number of participants and propose this relationship for future research.

Empirical support was provided to the important effects of different task characteristics on individual participation behaviors in FLOSS development tasks.

The findings can help FLOSS participants understand participation patterns in different tasks and choose the types of tasks to attend to.

This research explores the impact of task characteristics on participation in FLOSS development at the task level, while prior research on participation in FLOSS development has focused mainly on factors at the individual and/or project levels.

This study aims to highlight the challenges and opportunities of using GitHub as a data source in both research and programming education.

This study provides general overview of the challenges and opportunities faced while conducting empirical research using GitHub as a data source. The challenges and opportunities are framed using the input–process–output model of open-source software.

GitHub data accessed from the application programming interface (API) can have several limitations, which can be overcome by Web scraping and using external data repositories such as GHArchive and GHTorrent. There are also several idiosyncrasies about GitHub that researchers need to be aware of to be able to use the data effectively, which can represent an opportunity for research. The challenges and opportunities are summarized for the licenses, community, development process and product of free/libra and open-source software communities hosted on GitHub.

This study provides a summary of GitHub-related challenges and opportunities that researchers can leverage to improve their empirical research. Furthermore, this summary can be a valuable resource for instructors that plan to use GitHub as a data source in their data-focused programming courses.

This paper examines some of the ethical problems involved in undertaking Internet research and draws on historical accounts as well as contemporary studies to offer an analysis of the issues raised. It argues that privacy is a misleading and confusing concept to apply to the Internet, and that the concept of non‐alienation is more resourceful in addressing the many ethical issues surrounding Internet research. Using this as a basis, the paper then investigates the Free/Libre and Open Source research model and argues for the principles of “open source ethics” in researching the online world, which includes a participatory and democratic research method.

The purpose of this paper is to describe a case study of the development, features and evaluation of a rich internet application for libraries. It aims to demonstrate best practice in the use of software standards, development processes and evaluation.

Web 2.0, open source design methods and usability testing were used within an agile framework.

The adoption of agile software development methods, coupled with usability testing, would enable the library community to take full advantage of the techniques and principles inherent in Web 2.0 open source software.

A major component of the evaluation of OJAX was a series of usability tests. As is the nature of most usability studies, the results are not generalisable.

Aspects of agile software development methods, such as usability testing and iterative design, are recognised in the literature as contributing to the usability of library software. However, exploration of the use of a full agile framework plus usability testing to facilitate Web 2.0 open source software is rare in library‐related literature.

Our knowledge of why organizations continue to use open source software (OSS) infrastructure technologies is relatively limited, and existing models appear inadequate to explain this continuance phenomenon given that they are set at the individual level and also do not take into account the unique characteristics of OSS. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

Using an institutional perspective, this paper posits that coercive (business value of IT) and normative (open source ideology (IDEO)) factors may be credited with sustaining the continued use of OSS technologies. The study argues that organizations that subscribe to IDEO are more likely to continue using OSS technologies. Survey data are collected from organizations that have implemented an OSS infrastructure technology and a moderated multiple regression analysis is performed to test the proposed hypotheses.

In addition to the business value provided by OSS technologies, adherence to IDEO also impacts decisions to continue using those technologies. The results suggest that once an OSS is implemented in an organization, IDEO can enhance organizations’ intentions to continue using such technologies, directly, as well as indirectly, by amplifying the impact of the perceived business value of the technology.

Much of extant literature on continued use focuses on end-user technologies. This paper is one of the first to focus on infrastructure technologies and examine organizations’ intentions to continue using those technologies by developing a parsimonious theory-driven model for examining organizations’ continued use intentions toward infrastructure IT. Additionally, much of open source research to date has been inwardly focused, and this paper is one of few empirical studies to focus on the demand or consumption side of OSS technologies.

This research investigates how the value creation interests and activities of different stakeholder groups within one open source software (OSS) project influence the project's development over time.

The authors conducted a case study of OpenSimulator using textual and thematic analyses of the initial four years of OpenSimulator developer mailing list to identify each stakeholder group and guide our analysis of their interests and value creation activities over time.

The analysis revealed that while each stakeholder group was active within the OSS project's development, the different groups possessed complementary interests that enabled the project to evolve. In the formative period, entrepreneurs were interested in the software's strategic direction in the market, academics and SMEs in software functionality and large firms and hobbyists in software testing. Each group retained its primary interest in the maturing period with academics and SMEs separating into server- and client-side usability. The analysis shed light on how the different stakeholder groups overcame tensions amongst themselves and took specific actions to sustain the project.

The authors extend stakeholder theory by reconceptualizing the focal organization and its stakeholders for OSS projects. To date, OSS research has primarily focused on examining one project relative to its marketplace. Using stakeholder theory, we identified stakeholder groups within a single OSS project to demonstrate their distinct interests and how these interests influence their value creation activities over time. Collectively, these interests enable the project's long-term development.

The authors aim to investigate the concept of open innovation, identify different open innovation practices which help describe the continuum between closed and open innovation, and propose a framework that suggests an association between innovation contexts and practices.

The authors first identify the variables to describe innovation contexts and practices. Such variables are developed based on the literature and on a previous paper by the same authors in 2011. Then, they establish an association between contexts and practices, and test it through cases drawn from the existing literature.

The paper proposes a detailed assessment of open innovation practices and suggests the association between each of them and diverse innovation contexts. A few case examples drawn from the literature prove coherent with the theoretical framework underlying the proposed association.

The authors' results (and specifically the framework) enhance the organizations' awareness of the open innovation concept and the possible practices to implement it, as well as supporting managers to better select open innovation practices in different contexts.

This paper discusses the concept of open innovation practices to enhance the comprehension of the open innovation concept. Also, to the authors' knowledge, the proposed association between context and practices is original in that there are no similar theoretical frameworks that help organizations selecting innovation practices.

The purpose of this paper is to further the debate on Knowledge Artefacts (KAs), by presenting the design of WikiRate, a Collective Awareness platform whose goal is to support a wider public contributing to the generation of knowledge on environmental, social and governance (ESG) performance of companies.

The material presented in the paper comes from the first-hand experience of the authors as part of the WikiRate design team. This material is reflexively discussed using concepts from the field of science and technology studies.

Using the concept of the “funnel of interest”, the authors discuss how the design of a KA like WikiRate relies on the designers’ capacity to translate general statements into particular design solutions. The authors also show how this funnelling helps understanding the interplay between situativity and objectivity in a KA. The authors show how WikiRate is a peer-production platform based on situativity, which requires a robust level of objectivity for producing reliable knowledge about the ESG performance of companies.

This paper furthers the debate on KAs. It presents a relevant design example and offers in the discussion a set of design and community building recommendations to practitioners.