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Investigating Knowledge Management Practices at OpenStack

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Information Literacy in Everyday Life (ECIL 2018)

Part of the book series: Communications in Computer and Information Science ((CCIS,volume 989))

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Abstract

Knowledge work is comprised of specialists who collaborate by ex-changing expertise and skills to develop products and services - this is exactly what happens also in open-source software development communities in a virtual and globally distributed fashion. In this study, we address some of the information practices of a large and well-known open-source community known as OpenStack. More specifically, we take the theoretical notion of information literacy landscapes to analyze the day-to-day information-intensive work practices in the OpenStack community. We collect and analyze naturally occurring trace data derived from the OpenStack project in a qualitative manner. Our findings report a set of ten information-intensive work practices that in our view merit to be presented to an audience that is interested in information literacy and digital work but not necessarily in software development. These ten practices are branching, committing, fetching, pushing, merging, reviewing, continuously integrating, gating, release management, and announcing. While most of these practices cannot be carried out in non-digital environments, the increasing trend towards the digitalization of work practices reiterates the importance of studying the information-intensive knowledge management practices in digital work.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Naturally occurring data in the sense of being collected and created without direct intervention from the researchers. See http://methods.sagepub.com/video/what-is-naturally-occurring-data for a discussion on naturally occurring data by Professor David Silverman.

  2. 2.

    Please note that Git was created by Linus Torvalds in 2005 to support the distributed collaborative development of the Linux operating system.As pointed out in https://github.com/about as of March 2018, 27 million people and 80 million projects use the Git infrastructure provided by GitHub (the main commercial firm providing software development infrastructures based on Git).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Social Sciences, Business and Economics, Åbo Akademi University, Turku, Finland

    José Apolinário Teixeira, Helena Karsten & Gunilla Widén

Authors
  1. José Apolinário Teixeira
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  2. Helena Karsten
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  3. Gunilla Widén
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to José Apolinário Teixeira .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Information Management, Faculty of Letters, Hacettepe University, Beytepe, Ankara, Turkey

    Serap Kurbanoğlu

  2. Department of Information and Communication Sciences, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb, Zagreb, Croatia

    Sonja Špiranec

  3. Department of Information Management, Faculty of Letters, Hacettepe University, Beytepe, Ankara, Turkey

    Yurdagül Ünal

  4. University of Paris-Est, Champs-sur-Marne, France

    Joumana Boustany

  5. Department of Information and Communication Studies, Faculty of Humanities, University of Oulu, Oulu, Finland

    Maija Leena Huotari

  6. Department of Information Studies , University of California Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, USA

    Esther Grassian

  7. Charles E. Young Research Library, University of California Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, USA

    Diane Mizrachi

  8. School of Information, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, USA

    Loriene Roy

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Teixeira, J.A., Karsten, H., Widén, G. (2019). Investigating Knowledge Management Practices at OpenStack. In: Kurbanoğlu, S., et al. Information Literacy in Everyday Life. ECIL 2018. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 989. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-13472-3_19

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-13472-3_19

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-13471-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-13472-3

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