TY - Generic T1 - Work features to support stigmergic coordination in distributed teams Y1 - 2017 A1 - Kevin Crowston A1 - James Howison A1 - Bolici, Francesco A1 - Carsten Østerlund KW - Coordination KW - Stigmergy AB -

When work products are shared via a computer system, members of distributed teams can see the work products produced by remote colleagues as easily as those from local colleagues. Drawing on coordination theory and work in computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW), we theorize that these work products can provide information to support team coordination, that is, that work can be coordinated through the outcome of the work itself, a mode of coordination analogous to the biological process of stigmergy. Based on studies of documents and work, we postulate three features of work products that enable them to support team coordination, namely having a clear genre, being visible and mobile, and being combinable. These claims are illustrated with examples drawn from free/libre open source software development teams. We conclude by discussing how the proposed theory might be empirically tested.

JF - Academy of Management Annual Meeting ER - TY - Generic T1 - Is Wikipedia Inefficient? Modelling Effort and Participation in Wikipedia T2 - Forty-sixth Hawai'i International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS-46) Y1 - 2013 A1 - Kevin Crowston A1 - Nicolas Jullien A1 - Felipe Ortega JF - Forty-sixth Hawai'i International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS-46) CY - Wailea, HI UR - http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1960696 ER - TY - Generic T1 - What characterizes documents that bridge boundaries compared to documents that do not? An exploratory study of documentation in FLOSS teams T2 - Hawai'i International Conference on System Science Y1 - 2011 A1 - Carsten Østerlund A1 - Kevin Crowston JF - Hawai'i International Conference on System Science ER - TY - CONF T1 - Work as coordination and coordination as work: A process perspective on FLOSS development projects T2 - Third International Symposium on Process Organization Studies Y1 - 2011 A1 - Kevin Crowston A1 - Carsten Østerlund A1 - James Howison A1 - Bolici, Francesco JF - Third International Symposium on Process Organization Studies CY - Corfu, Greece UR - http://www.process-symposium.com/ ER -