Time-bounded events such as hackathons, data dives, codefests, hack-days, sprints or edit-a-thons have increasingly gained attention from practitioners and researchers. Yet there is a paucity of research on corporate hackathons, which are nearly ubiquitous and present significant organizational, cultural, and managerial challenges. To provide a comprehensive understanding of team processes and broad array of outcomes of corporate hackathons, we conducted a mixed-methods, multiple case study of five teams that participated in a large scale corporate hackathon. Two teams were “pre-existing” teams (PETs) and three were newly-formed “flash” teams (FTs). Our analysis revealed that PETs coordinated almost as if it was just another day at the office while creating innovations within the boundary of their regular work, whereas FTs adopted role-based coordination adapted to the hackathon context while creating innovations beyond the boundary of their regular work. Project sustainability depended on how much effort the team put into finding a home for their projects and whether their project was a good fit with existing products in the organization’s product portfolio. Moreover, hackathon participation had perceived positive effects on participants’ skills, careers, and social networks.

Background: Some developer activity traditionally performed manually, such as making code commits, opening, managing, or closing issues is increasingly subject to automation in many OSS projects. Specifically, such activity is often performed by tools that react to events or run at specific times. We refer to such automation tools as bots and, in many software mining scenarios related to developer productivity or code quality, it is desirable to identify bots in order to separate their actions from actions of individuals. Aim: Find an automated way of identifying bots and code committed by these bots, and to characterize the types of bots based on their activity patterns. Method and Result: We propose BIMAN, a systematic approach to detect bots using author names, commit messages, files modified by the commit, and projects associated with the commits. For our test data, the value for AUC-ROC was 0.9. We also characterized these bots based on the time patterns of their code commits and the types of files modified, and found that they primarily work with documentation files and web pages, and these files are most prevalent in HTML and JavaScript ecosystems. We have compiled a shareable dataset containing detailed information about 461 bots we found (all of which have more than 1000 commits) and 13,762,430 commits they created.

Open online communities rely on social norms for behavior regulation, group cohesion, and sustainability. Research on the role of social norms online has mainly focused on one source of influence at a time, making it difficult to separate different normative influences and understand their interactions. In this study, we use the Focus Theory to examine interactions between several sources of normative influence in a Wikipedia sub-community: local descriptive norms, local injunctive norms, and norms imported from similar sub-communities. We find that exposure to injunctive norms has a stronger effect than descriptive norms, that the likelihood of performing a behavior is higher when both injunctive and descriptive norms are congruent, and that conflicting social norms may negatively impact pro-normative behavior. We contextualize these findings through member interviews, and discuss their implications for both future research on normative influence in online groups and the design of systems that support open collaboration.

Time bounded events such as hackathons, data dives, codefests, hack-days, sprints or edit-a-thons have increasingly gained attention from practitioners and researchers. Existing research, however, has mainly focused on the event itself, while potential outcomes of hackathons have received limited attention. Furthermore, most research around hackathons focuses on collegiate or civic events. Research around hackathons internal to tech companies, which are nearly ubiquitous, and present significant organizational, cultural, and managerial challenges, remains scarce. In this paper we address this gap by presenting findings from a case study of five teams which participated in a large scale corporate hackathon. Most team members voiced their intentions to continue the projects their worked on during the hackathon, but those whose projects did get continued were characterized by meticulous preparation, a focus on executing a shared vision during the hackathon, extended dissemination activities afterwards and a fit to existing product lines. Such teams were led by individuals who perceived the hackathon as an opportunity to bring their idea to life and advance their careers, and who recruited teams who had a strong interest in the idea and in learning the skills necessary to contribute efficiently. Our analysis also revealed that individual team members perceived hackathon participation to have positive effects on their career parts, networks and skill development.

Negative experiences in diverse software development teams have the potential to turn off minority participants from future team-based software development activity. We examine the use of brainstorming as one concrete team processes that may be used to improve the satisfaction of minority developers when working in a group. Situating our study in time-intensive hackathon-like environments where engagement of all team members is particularly crucial, we use a combination of survey and interview data to test our propositions. We find that brainstorming strategies are particularly effective for team members who identify as minorities, and support satisfaction with both the process and outcomes of teamwork through different mechanisms.

Users of social network services (SNSs) have to cope with a new set of privacy challenges because personal information on an SNS is often co-owned and co-managed by various distributed social ties. Using a multi-methods and multinational approach, we investigated Facebook users' privacy behavior by focusing on how they co-manage private information. Our findings from focus-group interviews (n = 28) and online surveys (n = 299) suggest that Facebook users primarily apply four different practices of privacy management: collaborative strategies, corrective strategies, preventive strategies, and information control. The four dimensions of privacy management display selective relationships with theoretical antecedents (e.g., self-efficacy, collective-efficacy, attitudes, privacy concern), indicating that each behavior is motivated by a different combination of conditions. Implications for research and practice are discussed.

Conflict is an important group process, and more so in self-organizing teams with fluid boundaries and high possibility for turnover. We empirically investigate different types of conflict in Free and Open Source Software development teams, their antecedents and impact on developers&' sustained participation. Following a survey of 222 FOSS developers, we find conflict to have an overall negative effect on developer retention. Furthermore, different types of conflict have varying impact on outcomes. In particular, only normative conflict levels negatively impact intention to remain in a FOSS project. Both normative and process conflict negatively affect perceptions of team performance, while the co-occurrence of task and process conflict exacerbate negative effects on outcomes. Though we find structural factors like task interdependence and geographical distribution increase overall conflict levels in FOSS teams, participatory decision-making and a transformational leadership style have an ameliorating effect. Implications for theory and practice are discussed.

As the nature of virtual work changes, so must our understanding of important processes such as conflict. The present study examines conflict in ongoing virtual teams by situating itself in the context of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) development. A series of semi-structured interviews with diverse representatives of the FOSS community highlight differences in the way conflict occurs. Specifically, a transformation of conflict types is observed together with a form of conflict previously unidentified in work on virtual teams. Findings suggest that the changing structure of ongoing virtual teams has important consequences for team processes like conflict.