Community Building on the Web: Secret Strategies for Successful Online Communities
Community Building on the Web: Secret Strategies for Successful Online Communities
Using social psychology to motivate contributions to online communities
CSCW '04 Proceedings of the 2004 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work
Organizing Far from Equilibrium: Nonlinear Change in Organizational Fields
Organization Science
Understanding Sustained Participation in Open Source Software Projects
Journal of Management Information Systems
"Cool" or "monster"?: company takeovers and their effect on open source community participation
Proceedings of the 2011 iConference
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Few studies of online communities take exogenous factors into account while explaining community participation. We present preliminary results from a study investigating the impact of steward companies' actions on online community participation. We identified two events: (1) open sourcing of Java by Sun and (2) acquisition of Sun (and consequently of Java) by Oracle, and examined participation in their developer online communities. We found significant change in participation levels around each event with both significant increases and decreases. We conjecture that participation increased if the action was perceived as supportive by developers (e.g. Sun's open sourcing of Java) whereas it decreased if the action was perceived as detrimental by developers (e.g. Oracle's acquisition of Sun).