Topic "Cooperation and Conflicts"

The aspect of cooperation gets its own topic because it is still amazing that a global cooperation of individuals can produce the wide range of products as seen in the Open Source movement. But cooperation is not easy, as anybody can tell who has ever worked on a project with somebody else. This topic shall therefore investigate how global cooperation can work, how it does work, what the problems are that have been overcome by technology and which ones are still open, how do virtual developement teams achieve information exchange and are successfull in setting goals? What happens if cooperation fails and conflicts arise?

This topic is maybe a little fuzzy on the borders towards leadership, motivation, tools, etc.

Key Questions

• Which tools are used for cooperation that are used in the Open Source world?
• How are conflicts resolved and how did they occur in the first place?
• Which kinds of influences on the social structure are given by the distribution of the developers on the entire globe?

Literature

• Joseph Feller, Brian Fitzgerald, Scott Hissam, Karim Lakhani (eds). Collaboration, Conflict and Control. Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Open Source Software Engineering. 2004.(PDF)
• Caspar Clemens Mireau, 2002. Motivation und Organisation von Open Source Projekten . Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, Studiengang Medienkultur. 2002.(PDF)