CAREER: The Open Source/Content Commons as a New Paradigm for Collaborative Scientific Research: A Research and Teaching Agenda

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The proposed research seeks to identify factors that lead to success and failure of Open Source (OS) software projects and to understand how these factors relate to more generic, open content (OC) projects. There are two specific research objectives: (1) To develop a theory of success and failure of OS programming projects seen from the point of view of an open commons; and (2) to undertake a longitudinal study of open content projects to see if they exhibit similar success/failure characteristics. The goal of both will be to develop design principles for the organization of future OS or OC projects. To achieve these objectives, an empirical study of the institutional designs of OS and OC projects will be undertaken. An expected contribution of the work will be to connect the rich body of theoretical and empirical research on the governance of "environmental commons" to the recent research related to OS found largely in the field of information systems. The teaching objective is to take the knowledge gained from the research program to create a Geographic Information Systems (GIS) curriculum based entirely on OS GIS software. In addition, students will be taught about participation in OS/OC GIS projects. The online teaching component of this project, which embraces the open access principles of OS and OC, has the potential to reach a broad GIS community worldwide and could make an important impact, especially in developing world contexts. But perhaps more importantly, through the identification of OS/OC commons design principles, the proposed work could provide new insights on how to organize Internet-based collaborative scientific research in the future.