Project Summary: DHB: Investigating the Dynamics of Free/Libre Open Source Software Development Teams

Increasingly, organizational work is performed by distributed teams of interdependent knowledge workers. Such teams have many benefits, but geographic, organizational and social distance between members makes it difficult for team members to create the shared understandings and social structures necessary to be effective. But as yet, research and practitioner communities know little about the dynamics of distributed teams, especially not self-organizing ones. We propose a multi-disciplinary and inter-disciplinary study (social and computer science) in the context of teams of Free/Libre Open Source (FLOSS) software developers to better understand the cognitive and social structures that underlie changes in individual and team behaviours in these teams. Our study addresses the general research question: What are the dynamics through which self-organizing distributed teams develop and work?