Rereading Steven Weber

Steven Weber's book The Success of Open Source is a book I read when I first joined the OSM board. There are a lot of books about Open Source but Weber's is the one that makes the most serious effort to think about open source from a social science perspective. Which is to say, it incorporates a serious effort to use somewhat systematic empirical data and to apply a number of theoretical concepts from political economy. In other words, very much from my world and I'd guess almost no one actually in the open source world has actually read it all the way through. This is just like the fact that I've never read, I don't know, Knuth. I can and do read about code and algorithms and so on--no problem reading and understanding most of the mass market books on how to write PHP, but let's be real. There are some books that  are for people who have taken the  computer science classes that are for computer scientists  and there are some that are for people like me who are code curious. So that's why people who write software read books like The Cathedral and the Bazaar or Dreaming in Code (both important books) that give an anthropology-lite treatment of the open source world, but they aren't really reading serious social science. If nothing else you can tell by the bibliographies.

So I've decided to start rereading Weber's book three years later. When I first read it there were some things I thought he got wrong and some things that i thought he got right.

I'm very interested in the general issue of how people organize themselves to get things done. Sometimes this is done in an intentional and self conscious manner, but at other times and much more often this is shaped by social and institutional forces. For example, early in my time in graduate school there was an important article by two faculty members in my department (Paul DiMaggio and Woody Powell) called "The iron cage revisited" institutional isomorphism and collective rationality in organizational fields" which helped to clarify this.  The short version of the idea is that organizations, especially those in the same general environment or field, often end up  very similar to each other. The question is why? Is there just some "natural" way for organizations to form? Or can we understand this as a consequence of social and institutional factors.  Of course, answer number two is correct. People in organizations think those organizations just happen or happen solely because of conscious decisions they make, but that kind of thinking represents two extremes of the same wrong approach. The first has no room for people to make decisions. The second overstates the level of autonomy that people have when organizing. So, this line of work helps us understand why open source projects tend to follow one of a few patterns.

Weber identifies four key strategies that open source projects use to "manage complexity among a geographically dispersed community not subject to hierarchical control."  These are "technical design, sanctioning mechanisms, the license as explicit social structure, and formal governance institutions." (172)

Each one of these deserves a careful look, so I'm going to do separate discussions. Taken together they help explain a great deal.