This article studies open-source 3D printer manufacturers’ business models, as well as the strategies into which these models fit. To do so, we use the concepts of business model innovation and specific capabilities. The analysis of the particularities of the projects and of the associated companies reveals two “pure” open-hardware strategies, the first one based on the temporary exploitation of the free/libre/open hardware community as a complementary resources, the second one based on the construction of a sustainable collaborative activity in order to maintain dynamic capabilities that are hard to imitate.

Recent studies have improved our knowledge about the different types or profiles of online contributors, from casual to very involved ones, through focused people. But they use very complex methodologies, making their replication by the practitioners limited. We show on both Romanian and Danish wikis that using only the edit and their distribution over time to feed clustering techniques, allows to build these profiles with good accuracy and stability. This suggests that light monitoring of newcomers may be sufficient to adapt the interaction with them and to increase the retention rate.

In this study, we were interested in studying which characteristics of virtual teams are good predictors for the quality of their production. The experiment involved obtaining the Spanish Wikipedia database dump and applying different data mining techniques suitable for large data sets to label the whole set of articles according to their quality (comparing them with the Featured/Good Articles, or FA/GA). Then we created the attributes that describe the characteristics of the team who produced the articles and using decision tree methods, we obtained the most relevant characteristics of the teams that produced FA/GA. The team's maximum efficiency and the total length of contribution are the most important predictors. This article contributes to the literature on virtual team organization.

In epistemic communities, people are said to be selected on their contribution in knowledge to the project (articles, codes, etc.). However, the socialization process is an important factor for inclusion, sustainability as a contributor, and promotion. Finally, what matters for being promoted? Being a good contributor? Being a good animator? Knowing the boss? We explore this question by looking at the election process for administrators in the English Wikipedia. We used the candidates' revisions and/or social attributes to construct a predictive model of promotion success, based on the candidates' past behavior and a random forest algorithm. Our model explains 78% of the results, which is better than the former models. It also helps to refine the explanation of the election process.

We evaluate the efficiency of an online knowledge production project and identify factors that affect efficiency. To assess efficiency, we used the Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) modelling methodology. We apply DEA to data from more than 30 Wikipedia language projects over three years. We show that the main Wikipedia projects were indeed less efficient that smaller ones, an effect that can be attributed in part to decreasing returns to scale.

Epistemic communities are said to be project-oriented communities of experts, evaluated on their contribution in terms of knowledge, where the main criterion for promotion is knowledge production [3]. However, [5], for Wikipedia, [7], for open source, have argued that taking responsibility is an additional step from being a regular contributor, and social interactions with peers may be an additional requirement for being promoted [6].