Toward a dynamic feedback theory of open online collaboration communities

This study posits a theory of open online collaboration communities in the form of a dynamic feedback framework and provides implications about the potential consequences of policy interventions for improving the performance of such communities. The study was carried out in three phases. During the first phase, several theoretical approaches were integrated to build a dynamic feedback model of a hypothetical open source software development community. The second phase involved the administration and analysis of a series of interviews with the members of an actual instructional material development community, in order to test the applicability of a generalized version of the open source software development model and its implications to that specific community. In the third phase, the implications of the initial model and the findings of the interviews were integrated to posit a theory of open online collaboration communities, in the form of a dynamic feedback framework. The study provided theoretical and practical implications about open online collaboration communities, and thus, contributed to several streams of literature, generated critical insights for managing open online collaboration communities, and laid a foundation for a variety of potential future research studies.