Paul B. Laat
Abstract
Open-source communities that focus on content rely squarely on the contributions of invisible strangers in cyberspace. How do such communities handle the problem of trusting that strangers have good intentions and adequate competence? This question is explored in relation to communities in which such trust is a vital issue: peer production of software (FreeBSD and Mozilla in particular) and encyclopaedia entries (Wikipedia in particular). In the context of open-source software, it is argued that trust was inferred from an underlying `hacker ethic', which already existed. The Wikipedian project, by contrast, had to create an appropriate ethic along the way. In the interim, the assumption simply had to be that potential contributors were trustworthy; they were granted `substantial trust'. Subsequently, projects from both communities introduced rules and regulations which partly substituted for the need to perceive contributors as trustworthy. They faced a design choice in the continuum between a high-discretion design (granting a large amount of trust to contributors) and a low-discretion design (leaving only a small amount of trust to contributors). It is found that open-source designs for software and encyclopaedias are likely to converge in the future towards a mid-level of discretion. In such a design the anonymous user is no longer invested with unquestioning trust.
- Adler, P. S., & Borys, B. (1996). Two types of bureaucracy: Enabling and coercive. Administrative Science Quarterly, 41(1), 61-89.Google Scholar
Cross Ref
- Andrews, C. K., Lair, C. D., & Landry, B. (2005). The labor process in software startups: Production on a virtual assembly line? In R. Barrett (Ed.), Management, labour process and software development (pp. 45-76). London/New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
- Baier, A. (1986). Trust and antitrust. Ethics, 96(2), 231-260.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Baier, A. C. (1992). Trusting people. Philosophical Perspectives, 6, 137-153.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Benkler, Y. (2006). The wealth of networks: How social production transforms markets and freedom. New Haven/London: Yale University Press. Google Scholar
- Coleman, E. G., & Hill, B. (2005). The social production of ethics in Debian & free software communities: Anthropological lessons for vocational ethics. In S. Koch (Ed.), Free/open source software development (pp. 273-295). Hershey: Idea Group.Google Scholar
- De Laat, P. B. (2005). Trusting virtual trust. Ethics and Information Technology, 7, 167-180. Google ScholarDigital Library
- De Laat, P. B. (2007). Governance of open source software: State of the art. Journal of Management and Governance, 11(2), 165-177.Google ScholarCross Ref
- De Laat, P. B. (2008). Online diaries: Reflections on trust, privacy, and exhibitionism. Ethics and Information Technology, 10, 57-69. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Fox, A. (1974). Beyond contract: Work, power and trust relations. London: Faber and Faber.Google Scholar
- Gambetta, D. (1988). Can we trust trust? In D. Gambetta (Ed.), Trust: Making and breaking cooperative relations (pp. 213-237). Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
- Granovetter, M. (1985). Economic action and social structure: The problem of embeddedness. American Journal of Sociology, 91(3), 481-510.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Himanen, P. (2001). The hacker ethic and the spirit of the information age. London: Vintage. Google Scholar
- Holck, J., & Jørgensen, N. (2005). Do not check in on red: Control meets anarchy in two open source projects. In S. Koch (Ed.), Free/open source software development (pp. 1-26). Hershey: Idea Group.Google Scholar
- Jørgensen, N. (2001). Putting it all in the trunk: Incremental software development in the FreeBSD open source project. Information Systems Journal, 11, 321-336.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Lane, M. S., Van der Vyver, G. L., Basnet, P. & Howard, S. (2004). Interpretative insights into interpersonal trust and effectiveness of virtual communities of open source software (OSS) developers. 15th Annual Australasian Conference on Information Systems (ACIS), Hobart, Tasmania. Retrieved from http://aisel.aisnet.org/acis2004/93.Google Scholar
- Levy, S. (1984). Hackers: Heroes of the computer revolution. London/New York: Penguin. Google Scholar
- Luhmann, N. (1968). Vertrauen: Ein Mechanismus der Reduktion sozialer Komplexität (4th ed.). Stuttgart: Lucius & Lucius, 2000 (N. Luhmann, Trans., 1979. Trust and power. Chichester: John Wiley).Google Scholar
- McGeer, V. (2008). Trust, hope and empowerment. Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 86(2), 237-254.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Mizrach, S. (1997). Is there a hacker ethic for 90s hackers? Retrieved from http://www.fiu.edu/~mizrachs/hackethic.html.Google Scholar
- Pettit, P. (1995). The cunning of trust. Philosophy & Public Affairs, 24(3), 202-225.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Pettit, P. (2004). Trust, reliance and the Internet. Analyse und Kritik, 26, 108-121.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Robbins, J. (2005). Adopting open source software engineering (OSSE) practices by adopting OSSE Tools. In J. Feller, B. Fitzgerald, S. A. Hissam, & K. R. Lakhani (Eds.), Perspectives on free and open source software (pp. 245-264). Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.Google Scholar
- Sitkin, S. B., & Roth, N. L. (1993). Explaining the limited effectiveness of legalistic "remedies" for trust/distrust. Organization Science, 4, 367-392.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Viegas, F. B., Wattenberg, M., Kriss, J., & van Ham, F. (2007). Talk before you type: Coordination in Wikipedia. Proceedings of the 40th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Zucker, L. G. (1986). Production of trust: Institutional sources of economic structure, 1840-1920. Research in Organizational Behaviour, 8, 53-111.Google Scholar
Index Terms
- How can contributors to open-source communities be trusted? On the assumption, inference, and substitution of trust
Recommendations
Exploring the antecedents of trust in virtual communities
Although previous research has established that interpersonal trust and system trust are critical in shaping individual behaviour in virtual settings, the two perspectives have not been examined by IS researchers in virtual communities (VCs) ...
Trust and distrust on the web
We examine the content of trustful and distrustful user experience reports on the web.Distrust is mostly an effect of graphical and structural design issues of a website.Trust is based on social factors such as reviews or recommendations by friends. The ...
Factors affecting members' trust belief and behaviour intention in virtual communities
In this research we investigate whether antecedent factors of participant trust and institutional trust significantly influence members' trust belief towards virtual communities. Further, we investigate how members' trust levels affect their behaviour ...
Reviews
Barrett Hazeltine
The developers of open-source projects such as Mozilla or Wikipedia base their operation on trusting the contributors. The author concludes that "unquestioning trust in users has proved to be an unworkable assumption." Mechanisms are described in this paper that provide a substitute for the unquestioning trust. Open-source projects tend to start from a small group whose members know each other, so therefore trust can be inferred. After a project has grown, the only identifier of a contributor is generally an Internet protocol (IP) address, so, absent a substitute, trust can only be assumed. The beginning stages of the open-source software projects described in the paper, Mozilla and FreeBSD, benefited from the "hacker ethic." Wikipedia had no such culture to draw upon, so it developed a set of guidelines known as Wikiquette. Both the open-source software projects and Wikipedia were plagued with a few incompetent or malicious coders, and in response they created quite similar organizational structures. These structures are three-level hierarchies, with an observer, a developer, and a project owner. An observer has read-only privileges with the source code, a developer can change the code, and the project owner approves such changes. Such a structure limits the discretion of a contributor. An argument can be made, however, that structure is an enabler, giving direction to the coder. It appears that contributors to the German Wikipedia site welcomed structure, but contributors to the English version were incensed by it. Based on the examples described in this paper, the trend seems to be toward a medium amount of contributor discretion. This is a clear and thought-provoking paper, posing several other intriguing questions. Online Computing Reviews Service
Access critical reviews of Computing literature here
Become a reviewer for Computing Reviews.
Comments