Transparency and Coordination in Peer Production
This research addresses coordination challenges in collaborative work settings like open source communities, offering insights into how transparency can improve efficiency, though it is incremental in building on existing organizational theories.
The paper investigates how transparency in work environments affects coordination, using a qualitative study of open source software developers to reveal that transparency enables selective dependency formation, project monitoring, and artifact understandability, which facilitates coordination.
This paper examines coordination in transparent work environments - environments where the content of work artifacts, and the actions taken on these artifacts, are fully visible to organizational members. Our qualitative study of a community of open source software developers revealed a coordination system characterized by interest-based, asynchronous interaction and knowledge transfer. At the core of asynchronous knowledge transfer, lies the concept of quasi-codification, which occurs when rich process knowledge is implicitly encoded in work artifacts. Our findings suggest that members are able to more selectively form dependencies, monitor the trajectory of projects, and make their work understandable to others which facilitates coordination. We discuss two important characteristics that enable coordination activities in a transparent environment: the presence of an imagined audience that dictates the way artifacts are crafted, and experience within the environment, that allows individuals to derive knowledge from these artifacts. By showing how transparency influences coordination, this research challenges previous conceptions of coordination for complex, collaborative work.