Folding and Unfolding: Balancing Openness and Transparency in Open Source Communities
通过研究Linux内核开发，提出理论解释开源社区中透明性与开放性如何根据开发需求与封闭性相平衡，并引入“数字折叠”概念描述临时的不透明工作空间。
Open source communities rely on the espoused premise of complete openness and transparency of source code and development process. Yet, openness and transparency at times need to be balanced out with moments of less open and transparent work. Through our detailed study of Linux Kernel development, we build a theory that explains that transparency and openness are nuanced and changing qualities that certain developers manage as they use multiple digital technologies and create, in moments of needs, more opaque and closed digital spaces of work. We refer to these spaces as digital folds. Our paper contributes to the extant literature by providing a process theory of how transparency and openness are balanced with opacity and closure in open source communities according to the needs of the development work; by conceptualizing the nature of digital folds and their role in providing quiet spaces of work; and, by articulating how the process of digital folding and unfolding is made far more possible by select elite actors’ navigating the line between the pragmatics of coding and the accepted ideology of openness and transparency.