 Welcome to our 1230 OpenSTEM Community Conference presentation titled Open Entrepreneurship or Exploring How Entrepreneurs Build Social Capital in a Private Collective Community. I would ask the audience to hold their questions until the end of the presentation. At this time I'd like to introduce our esteemed guest and speakers, Yusuf Yettis, is a PhD candidate in the Department of Marketing and Strategy at the Stockholm School of Economics. She is focused on open innovation and is particularly interested in the social dynamics of open source communities, the global platforms and offer different means of organizing economic activity and knowledge creation. She investigates how these online communities self-organize and govern themselves and the role of that entrepreneurship plays in these communities. With her is Robert Teagland, Robert is an associate professor of the Center of Strategy and Competitiveness in the Stockholm School of Economics in Sweden. Her research focuses on relationship between knowledge flows and networks and performance in the individual, organizational and national levels. Also is Paul M. Taganji, Paul is an associate assistant professor at the University of Alabama at Burlington, USA. His research focuses on the intersection of social and digital networks and organizations for value creation purposes. Please give them a warm welcome. Our speakers. Hello everyone. Today we're going to present our presentation on open entrepreneurship, exploring how entrepreneurs build social capital in an open source community. As Dave introduced us, it is Robin Teagland, Paul DeGanji and myself, Zeynep Yettis, who have worked on this paper and we're very happy to present it here at the Open Simulator Conference today. So this is what we'll be going through today. So we will first give you some information about the background of our research and our motivation for writing this paper and doing this research. We will also tell you more about the theory and our research questions, how we built up our research questions. Thirdly, we are going to tell you about what kind of methods we use and the results we got from the study. Later we will discuss the results and we will talk about the limitations of our study and we would like to also take your questions once the presentation ends. So our starting point is that there are two models of knowledge creation. One is the one that is conducted by companies like Microsoft in which companies with employees and organizational boundaries knowledge is created and innovations come about. On the other side we have the collective like Open Simulator community or like Linux community. These are environments built by users and it's distributed freely regardless of affiliation. Some researchers have called this type of knowledge creation as a third mode of organizing economic activity. Interestingly we're seeing more involvement of firms in open source communities. More and more firms are becoming part of this knowledge distributed knowledge creation. Companies include IBM and Intel or Oracle and companies also share experiences with the community and co-create knowledge. These communities are seen as complementary assets to be leveraged and combined by these companies and they think that these can deliver competitive solutions for them. However, resources of the community are outside the boundaries of it. That's why these companies need to embed themselves in the community to leverage them. There has been some studies about how firms strategically influence these communities in different ways to make use of these communities. There's also this in models of knowledge creation there's also this difference between the private and the collective side of things. So on the one side we have entrepreneurs who are driven by personal vision and knowledge to realize an idea for a new venture and they're sometimes driven by most of the time driven by monetary motives. But on the other side we have the collective which is built by a lot of people. It's not only a person who wants to make money out of this. So it's built by these users and distributed freely regardless of affiliation. So at this tension point we developed our research question which is about how the entrepreneur tries to leverage the community and how it builds a social capital as a means to influence the community. So we're looking at this strategy taken by the entrepreneurs and different ways that the entrepreneur does to leverage and influence the community for his or her business. So we will also talk about our theory and research questions in the social capital literature. Social capital is defined by the resources embedded in a social structure and these resources can be accessed or mobilized in purposive action by the individual. And we're very much interested in the entrepreneur and how the entrepreneur leverages the resources in the community in the open source community. And in social capital theory there are three pillars to the, there are three pillars to social capital. One of them is structural. So it looks at how social capital is leveraged through networking and it looks at the network patterns. And the other one is the cognitive capital which is about the culture norms expectations. And the third one is relational capital and it's about the shared understanding of a group in this case the open source community. So we have under our overarching research question which is how the entrepreneurs build the community social capital as it means to influence the community. We have three different research questions underneath. So the first one relates to the structural capital. So we're interested in how do entrepreneurs position themselves in the open source community. The second one is about the cognitive capital aspect and we're interested in how do the entrepreneurs shape the culture of the community as it means to influence the community. And thirdly is it's about the relational capital and here we're interested in how do entrepreneurs contribute to shared understanding in the community. So within social capital theory Nahap Yatungoshal in their 1998 paper they had different three they looked at the three different pillars three pillars of social capital. So then in our research for the structural capital we would like to have a look at entrepreneurs and how they position themselves within the community to access resources. Lastly we look at the ability of entrepreneurs to develop a shared understanding of foster collaboration for this is for the cognitive capital aspect and for the relational capital we look at the ability of the entrepreneur to identify with subset of overarching network through common attribute. And our setting is the open simulator community over the last two years we interviewed some members of the community and we looked at the different sources of information that are available in the community. So we mainly use two methods one of them is text analysis and the other one is social network analysis. So for the text analysis we scraped the developer mailing list from the open simulator website and looked at different discussions that are taken that are done in the mailing list. We also had a look at the all low commit list in which the different developers and users can actually rate themselves their contributions. We also use the information on the open simulator wiki. We also used a lot of blogs, home pages of the members both developers and users of the open simulator community and we do up 21 interviews very very interesting interviews. We at this point would also like to thank the members of the open simulator community for their time because sometimes even when we agreed to have like an hour interview sometimes we could talk with the developers and the users for like two hours even longer. So it was very interesting that and it was very nice that a lot of people actually agreed to you know help us and give their idea about what's going on in the community. That was very very important insight for us. So we actually divided the period the data into two periods. One of them is from August 2007 till September 2009 and the second period we determined it as from October 2009 till October 2011. And the reason why we did is that we want to have a look at how the open simulator community changed and developed so we want to have two time periods and not only because these time periods are around two years each but also at the end of September 2009 the hype around virtual worlds decreased a bit and also there were more people actually that were going into the user developer user mailing list. So we could see that there was like a structural difference between these two time periods. So as for the methodology as I mentioned the structural capital is about individuals position within the network. So in order to understand entrepreneurs position in the open simulator community we conducted network analysis and we looked at a different a lot of different measures to understand how entrepreneurs position themselves and some of them are centrality structural whole measures density measures and for the cognitive capital side we are interested we were interested in looking at the shared language in the in the community among the entrepreneurs. So we looked at we did some text analysis and generated word word burst list. I will also talk more about this. We also did code analysis contributions we also looked at the contributions to code repository. For the relational capital aspect so we were interested in the ability of the individual to identify with subset of overarching network through a common attribute and we looked at the heterogeneity of ties so how the identification with groups and we also looked at the turnover among different groups. So when we looked at the collapse node structure in for the for the different groups oh and I forgot to mention that we actually tagged the different members of the community according to their organizational affiliations and we had several groups including academics, entrepreneurs, hobbyists, large firm employees, small firm employees, research institutes and NGOs. And when we looked at the group the collapse node structures we saw that entrepreneurs are very central as a group not only individual but as a group they're very central in the network and this was the case for both of the time periods. As you can see in the slide in the second period centrality changes shifted a little bit where also academics and hobbies became quite big but still we can see that entrepreneurs were quite central in both of the periods as a group. When we look at the individual nodes in the social network we also see that individually entrepreneurs are quite central as a group and in period one network density is even higher but in both periods if you have a especially focused on the red dots which represent the entrepreneurs they're very central in the network. When we looked at the different network measures we also saw that for network measures like degree closeness between this icon vector structural holes they we saw that these measures were very high for entrepreneurs again. So in a way entrepreneurs are positioned to receive information quickly and near important members of the community doesn't matter if entrepreneurs or academics and they bridge disparate sections of the sections of the community across time periods. How to look at the although committers and as I mentioned before although commitless there you can see how the different members of the community rate themselves their contributions. We see that entrepreneurs are the largest contributing group of the core developers and overall community to the code repository. So in the first period in the although top 20 committers entrepreneurs constitute 55% of the total committers and the second period it's 45%. So these are very large numbers and we can see that entrepreneurs really have a central role. For the cognitive capital to understand cognitive capital how entrepreneurs contribute to cognitive capital. We did a worse first analysis. Worst first analysis give information about the topics that different groups talk about in the community and we use the mailing list to do this analysis. And when we look at what look at the discussions that entrepreneurs are having in the developers mailing list. We see that entrepreneurs talk about real world real world applications of the open simulator code software. And they ensure the development of activities that are relevant to a diverse membership. But one thing that was quite interesting when if you look at the period choose word burst analysis. The first word that comes up is we. So it's also interesting to see that entrepreneurs maybe when they talk about different issues they still have this idea of the group. And instead of saying a lot of eyes they say we even though we're talking about entrepreneurs and you would think that entrepreneurs maybe would be more egocentric and they would talk about their business and so forth. But we actually see that they they really talk about they care about the other entrepreneurs and they talk about it as a group. When we also looked at the heterogeneous scores which gives that which gives us information about the different groups and how they relate to other members of the community. We see that entrepreneurs maintain the most diverse ties in the community. So we think they might be doing that to get a wide variety of perspectives for their business. So in a way they're like a social glue in the community. And also for the relational capital aspect again. This was a very interesting diagram. Here the red dots represent members of the community who are active in both of the periods. Whereas the blue one is the newcomers. So it's the people who are actually who joined the community in the second period. And the yellow ones are the people who were active in the first period but then left the community. What was interesting to see was that entrepreneurs act as greeters for new members in terms of recruitment, information, guidance and training. You can see that there are these red dots in the middle of the blue group in the right side of the diagram. And actually those people are entrepreneurs mainly. So as for our contributions with this research study. So in the beginning we asked the question of how do entrepreneurs build the community's social capital as it means to influence the community. So for the structural capital we found that entrepreneurs position themselves as a core. And they don't only do it individually but also as a group and bridge across the community. For the cognitive capital side. Entrepreneurs ensure focus of community on real world applications and relevance. And here again I should mention that the group feeling of entrepreneurs was an interesting result that we got out of this study. For the relational capital aspect, entrepreneurs create social glue across community members with diverse interests and goals. So we have a couple of really interesting results on how entrepreneurs contribute to the building of intellectual capital in the community. So entrepreneurs access to parties to exchange and combine intellectual capital. They embed themselves through the community and serve as bridges across different groups, not only among each other but across groups. And therefore they serve to both facilitate information diffusion but also combination of exchange of experiences across the network. They also anticipate the value of combining exchange and intellectual capital. So as entrepreneurs are clearly visible within the community in building all three components of social capital both the structural cognitive and relational. And their participation lead to expectancy by others that the community will create something of value. So they're really good ambassadors for the open simulator community. They also have the motivation to combine and exchange intellectual capital. So through building cognitive and relational capital, they enable higher levels of trust and decreasing propensity for opportunism and free writing by others. So they also encourage others to contribute to the community. They also contribute to the combination capability. So at individual levels, entrepreneurs maintain really diverse networks to gain access to new information and novel information. But they also collaborate with other entrepreneurs to realize these opportunities through exchanges of free sources. And these actions support development of communities, combinative capability. So entrepreneurs contribute to the community's ability to create intellectual capital, which is important for community sustainability. And I should also add that this was actually our starting point, the starting point of our research program. What sustains the community is a very interesting questions for us. So what makes the community sustain itself and why does it live on? And at this point, it's quite interesting to see that entrepreneurs are actually agents that affect the sustainability of the community. But we also see that the community provides entrepreneurs to access to diverse sets of resources and enable them to identify and realize opportunities. And this is very important for entrepreneurs business. And this is actually really the core idea of our study. It's this idea of open entrepreneurship. We see that entrepreneurs engage in social capital building. But in order to do that, they have to freely reveal, free reveal their intellectual property from time to time, quite often actually in this case. But at the same time, they also contribute to other resources for the community. What they get, get back from the community is also a lot of resources. So it is this, this relationship between the community and the entrepreneur is, is what we call open entrepreneurship. So they freely reveal their intellectual property, but they get the resources they need for their businesses. Three main contribution areas, one of them is the open source community literature. We saw that entrepreneurs facilitate the community's development of a combinative capability, which leads to the continuous creation of intellectual capital for the community. For the entrepreneurship literature, we touched upon the importance of importance of online communities to entrepreneurs as arenas for building social capital. This also shows that there's dialectical view of entrepreneurs as individuals who pursue both self and collective interests. For the social capital literature, apply social capital theory to open source community literature to show a symbiotic relationship between open source communities and entrepreneurs. And this is the idea about open entrepreneurship. We thank you for your attention. And we would like to get your comments and questions. Thank you. It usually takes a moment or two for everyone to formulate their questions. I'm sure we'll just wait a few minutes and see if we have any from the audience. Okay, perfect. Well, so the first question is, so how many open sieve devs do you did you actually talk to? So in total, we conducted 21 interviews. But some people we interviewed a few times, not more than three. But yeah, a few people we interviewed twice, and maybe one or two people three times. So I would say around 12, 13 people that we interviewed in total, mainly core developers. We would really like to do more interviews. Absolutely. We will also start we also have the idea to interview users who are not necessarily contributing a lot to the development of the code but who are active users of the community. As part of your sphere of interviewees, and did it include Melanie? Included Melanie, we actually interviewed her three times. It was very, very interesting talking to her very interesting. She's a she's a true open entrepreneur for us. Say that it's quite a connected community. But what is interesting is that it's different across different groups. And it's really we see that entrepreneurs are really connected among each other, but also they're very well connected to others. But if you're asking about the community in general, I would I have the tendency to say that yes, it's a very connected community. And did you study any other open source project? And is there any reference or common thread you might see in open source projects? So we we started to to research the Bitcoin community recently. Since I would say April, April 2013, we're at the very beginning stage of that research. We're also looking at the forums. We're doing a lot of web scraping and trying to understand the different discussions in the community. We also have a lot of data there. It's around we have around 1.15 million posts made by community members. So it will be very, very interesting to also compare at points. Of course, they're very different communities. Bitcoin community is is a really large scale community. And also the focus of the community is different. But yet they're open source. So so some things are very, very similar. And it would be really interesting to contrast the two communities. Yeah, Robin just posted the link to our paper. Would be great if you could we could get comments from you on that. Hi, maybe I could just say, Hi, this is Robin talking from Stockholm, in response to the question about differences. I've been doing a study of a firm sponsored open source community, easy systems. And I'd say that this is this the open sim community is much more well connected than the easy one. As to why we're still we haven't done a comparison yet. But that's actually one of the things that we're interested in doing. Hi, Krista. How are you? You were one of our interviewees as well. Thank you. Thank you. It's been a it's a fantastic research site. And we've really enjoyed very much enjoyed getting to know this community. And we're continuing our research. So we're we are working hard. In fact, this is Zaynep's task for the next month, right, Zaynep? That's true. All of us to, to really focus on this and getting out a couple papers. Yeah, we'll be doing a more, more in depth analysis of the mailing list. Actually, we're planning to do qualitative coding on them. So we will for sure share the paper once once we work on them. Paul, did you have anything to add? I was just thinking if you had something to say, Paul's voice is not working, unfortunately. So I was just wondering, is there for those in the audience, is there anything that was perhaps a little surprising or expected? When you saw the presentation? Actually, I was surprised at the amount of entrepreneurs who were involved and and that they were actually the glue of what makes the the open sim and the grids tick. Yeah, that was a surprise. Yeah, it was it was a surprise. That's actually, I can ask you, I mean, why, why, why did you find this surprising or unexpected? Well, the community as a whole is, gentlemen, I would think very good at sharing things. And I wouldn't think there would be that many entrepreneurs that were trying to make their living or have a side hobby type business that would make that would make a lot of sense. I would see the entrepreneurs into education and some niche in some way. And I believe the entrepreneurs do share because they do have separate niches or separate interests. But that's just my opinion. And my, my, my experience. Okay. Now, I mean, I could say it was surprising to me, I was not expecting to see so many entrepreneurs and not only so many entrepreneurs who were so central, and so active and playing these roles. And I think what you said there was interesting in terms of the niches and how, you know, as entrepreneurs and other members of the community find their niches, kind of spread themselves out through the community. I think this is something that we're going to be exploring as well, looking at how individuals do position themselves in the community over time and how they place a bridging roles across different types of users and accessing different types of resources and bringing them together. So this is actually one of the, one of the folks we're working on now. That is one of the areas that we did want to go through was actually understanding how the different structures can help the community grow or for that matter how it just functions. So one of the things we wanted to see is whether or not a particular, not just type as in terms of entrepreneur, but if a particular subtype of entrepreneur actually plays a bigger role. Yeah, that was Paul speaking. Yeah, sorry about that. Paul from Birmingham, Alabama. Yes, actually, that's a very good question. Tom Williams, he asks, is it because they are successful entrepreneurs that means they can continue to contribute? That's something that we are going to be looking into in terms of it depends on how you define successful. But in terms of what are they contributing back and how say accessing resources and the contribution to bought back, how that creates continues to sustain the community. I think actually, unfortunately, we have to wrap up here if I understood the the the request from the from the organizer. That's right, we're just about to close this session in two or three minutes. Get ready for the next session. We have we can probably take one or two more questions and or one question. And if anybody has one, now's the time. Now's the time where you're welcome to contact us later. We would love to discuss our research with anyone. So who has an interest in it? All right, now for attending very much. And that wraps up our session this afternoon. Very interesting, an informative group. For all of you, if there were still things to do on the conference level, and please go ahead and go to www.http colon, or excuse me, http colon slash slash www.conference.org, and you'll be able to look at the itinerary for the rest of the day. Again, thank you for coming and enjoy your stay here. Thank you very much. Thanks so much for hosting. Wonderful. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Thanks.