Schweik to publish Internet Success: A Study of Open Source Commons

Charlie Sschweik02chweik, Associate Director of NCDG, is the lead author of Internet Success: A Study of Open Source Commons forthcoming in May and published by MIT Press. The book is the product of the first large-scale empirical study to look at social, technical, and institutional aspects of open-source software (OSS)–readable software source code that can be copied, modified, and distributed freely. Schweik and his co-author Robert English examine factors that lead to success in OSS projects and work toward a better understanding of Internet-based collaboration. Drawing on literature from many disciplines and using a theoretical framework developed for the study of environmental commons, Schweik and English examine stages of OSS development, presenting multivariate statistical models of success and abandonment. Schweik and English argue that analyzing the conditions of OSS successes may also inform Internet collaborations in fields beyond software engineering, particularly those that aim to solve complex technical, social, and political problems.