Topic 2: ‘open source collaboration’
Introduction to Open Source Collaboration:
Open source collaboration is a very interesting way to develop software as the source code is accessible to everyone and people have freedom to enhance the software. Developers working together on a project a lot of benefits like mutual knowledge sharing, community feedback and quicker improvement.
Study cases: (In class exemples key takeaways)
In class, we had a look at multiple open source projects, Wikipedia is a very successful project that functions as an open source platform.
- Presentation of the model
Wikipedia is an online encyclopaedia that contains articles about a wide range of topics. It allows anyone to contribute to its online pages. Knowledge is then easily shared and used by individuals. This collaborative model was successful for the website as it is popular, used and trusted.
2) Community engagement
We explored how Wikipedia manages its community to keep the collaboration open while ensuring the quality of the content. Each article has an history where all the changes are tracked. Volunteers contribute to writing the information and keeping it up to date.
Wikipedia has a vibrant and impressive community. It is important to foster community engagement to keep the project alive.
There are many events and meetups organised by the community. All the events are listed on a page per country (Events – Wikimedia UK). Contributors also get a sense of belonging and community from contributing to articles.
3) Wikipedia’s collaboration tools
To facilitate collaboration, Wikipedia uses an online platform that allows users to create new content and articles, edit existing ones and revise community changes. This is all done in real time and is intuitive enough for anyone confortable enough with Wikipedia to contribute. There also is a “Learn to edit” page that can help user to get started with their contribution.
Some volunteers also take part in the creation of Bots to maintain the website. Most of the bots work as quality maintainers, for exemple: ClueBot reports and reverts vandalism detected on articles.
5) Limits
Although Wikipedia is open for anyone to edit, it doesn’t push for diversity. There is an article on the Wikipedia community: Wikipedia : Wikipedians . We can see that less than 13% of contributors are female. The huge gender bias in Wikipedia has its own page Gender gap – Meta (wikimedia.org) and is addressed by many organisations, researchers and the Wikimedia Foundation themselves.
Conclusion:
This case study on Wikipedia gave be really good insight on how to approach open source collaboration. The popularity of Wikipedia shows the importance of engaging the community, inclusivity and good contribution tools. It also shows that it is important to address bias and take action against it.