7 Coordination
Coordination is a commonly used word, meaning what needs to be done for a group to work effectively together.
In the academic field of organization science, coordination has a more specific meaning, provided by Malone and Crowston (1994)1.
Coordination is managing dependencies between activities
We will learn what this means, and how it relates to motivation for participation in open source, and discuss the role that version control and repositories play.
7.1 Pre-readings for class
Expectancy Theory (Wikipedia) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expectancy_theory
Expectancy Theory (useful figure): https://iedunote.com/expentancey-theory
Howison, J., & Crowston, K. (2014). Collaboration through open superposition: A theory of the open source way. MIS Quarterly, 38(1), 29–50. http://james.howison.name/pubs/howison-2014-superposition.pdf
7.2 Presentation
Malone, T. W., & Crowston, K. (1994). The interdisciplinary theory of coordination. ACM Computing Surveys, 26(1), 87–119. https://doi.org/10.1145/174666.174668 or http://ccs.mit.edu/papers/CCSWP157.html↩︎