Kevin Crowston

1 The Effects of Linking on Genres of Web Documents (2008)

Kevin Crowston, Marie Williams

Documents on the Web can be composed of multiple Web pages, suggesting the need to consider how linking between pages affects a document’s form. We illustrate this point by considering patterns of...

Genres of Digital Documents (2008)

Barbara H. Kwa�nik, Kevin Crowston

There has recently been an upsurge of interest in document genres—the fusion of form and function that makes a document instantly recognizable to its community of users. The utility of genre...

COMPUTATIONAL AGENTS (2008)

Kevin Crowston, Thomas W. Malone

Computational agents In the past, most uses of computers focused on automation, that is, the replacement of human workers by a computer system. Examples of these systems are common. For example,...

A Structurational Perspective on Leadership in Virtual Teams 1 (2008)

Robert Heckman, Kevin Crowston, Nora Misiolek

Abstract. Building on behavioural leadership theory and structuration theory, we present a two-order theory of leadership. It describes four classes of firstorder leadership behaviours (task...

Development: Theory and Measures (2008)

Kevin Crowston, James Howison, Hala Annabi

Crowston, K., Howison, J., and Annabi, H. (in press). Information systems success in free

Meet Me in Cyberspace: Meetings in the Distributed Work Environment (2008)

Katherine M. Chudoba, Chei Sian Lee, Kevin Crowston

who suggested that studying entries on employees ’ electronic calendars could lead to interesting insights into the changing nature of work. Meet Me in Cyberspace: Meetings in the Distributed Work...

Meet Me in Cyberspace: Meetings in the Distributed Work Environment (2008)

Katherine M. Chudoba, Chei Sian Lee, Kevin Crowston

who suggested that studying entries on employees ’ electronic calendars could lead to interesting insights into the changing nature of work. Meet Me in Cyberspace: Meetings in the Distributed Work...

DOCTORAL STUDENT ISSUES (2008)

Julie E. Kendall, Kevin Crowston, In He Received

new ways of organizing made possible by the extensive use of information technology.

1 (2007)

Kevin Crowston, Barbara Scozzi, Politecnico Di Bari, Salvatore Buonocore

success factors for distributed work teams. Several authors have described OSS teams as having a hierarchical structure: a small team of core developers who oversee the development and contribute...

UNDERSTANDING PROCESSES IN ORGANIZATIONS (2007)

Kevin Crowston

We contribute to the evolving theory of organizational processes by developing a precise conceptualization of process. We argue that processes are assemblies of activities and explore constraints on...

13,552 words, inclusive The Social Embeddedness of Transactions: Evidence from the Residential Real Estate Industry (2007)

Steve Sawyer, Kevin Crowston, Rolf T. Wigand, Marcel Allbritton

grateful for their comments. The Social Embeddedness of Transactions: Evidence from the Residential Real Estate Industry Information and communications technologies (ICT) are becoming pervasive in...

Competency Rallying for Software Development (2007)

Kevin Crowston, Barbara Scozzi

The contribution of this paper is the identification and testing of factors important for the success of Open Source Software (OSS) projects. We present an analysis of OSS communities as virtual...

Evidence (2007)

Kevin Crowston, Steve Sawyer, Rolf Wig, Marcel Allbritton

do information and communication technologies reshape work?

Discontinuities and Post-Bureaucratic Organizing: A Framework and Research Propositions (2007)

Kathy Chudoba, Kevin Crowston, A Framework

Some organization theorists argue that prevailing theories of organizing are based primarily on detailed observations of bureaucratic work, but that the nature of work today is sufficiently different...

The social structure of free and open source software development (2007)

Kevin Crowston, James Howison

Metaphors, such as the Cathedral and Bazaar, used to describe the organization of FLOSS projects typically place them in sharp contrast to proprietary development by emphasizing FLOSS’s distinctive...

Future research on FLOSS development (2007)

Kevin Crowston

The following commentary is part of First Monday's Special Issue #2: Open Source.

The social structure of free and open source software development (originally published in Volume 10, Number 2, February 2005) (2007)

Kevin Crowston, James Howison

Metaphors, such as the Cathedral and Bazaar, used to describe the organization of FLOSS projects typically place them in sharp contrast to proprietary development by emphasizing FLOSS’s distinctive...

organizing distributed teams (2007)

Kevin Crowston, James Howison, Chengetai Masango, U. Yeliz Eseryel

role of face-to-face meetings in technology-supported self-

in (2006)

Kevin Crowston, Robert Heckman, Nora Misiolek

A structurational perspective on leadership

A Portfolio of FLOSS Project Success Measures (2005)

Kevin Crowston, James Howison

Information systems success is one of the most widely used dependent variables in information systems research, but research on Free/Libr and Open Source software (FLOSS) often fails to appropriately...

Eseryel, “Face-to-face interactions in selforganizing distributed teams,” presented at Academy of Management Conference (2005)

Kevin Crowston, James Howison, Chengetai Masango, U. Yeliz Eseryel

We explore the role of face-to-face meetings in the life of distributed teams using data from Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) development teams. Such distributed teams are part of many...

Hierarchy and centralization in Free and Open Source Software team communications (2005)

Kevin Crowston And, Kevin Crowston, James Howison

Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) development teams provide an interesting and convenient setting for studying distributed work. We begin by answering perhaps the most basic question: what is...

Effective work practices for FLOSS development: A model and propositions (2005)

Kevin Crowston, Hala Annabi, James Howison, Chengetai Masango

We review the literature on Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) development and on software development, distributed work and teams more generally to develop a theoretical model to explain the...

Coordination of free/libre open source software development (2005)

Kevin Crowston, Kangning Wei, Qing Li, U. Yeliz Eseryel, James Howison

The apparent success of free/libre open source software (FLOSS) development projects such as Linux, Apache, and many others has raised the question, what lessons from FLOSS development can be...

Please ask before citing or distributing (2005)

Kevin Crowston, Robert Heckman, Hala Annabi, Chengetai Masango

recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. The authors thank the FLOSS developers who...

Free/Libre Open Source Software: (2005)

Kevin Crowston

The bug fixing process in proprietary and

The perils and pitfalls of mining SourceForge (2004)

James Howison, Kevin Crowston

SourceForge provides abundant accessible data from Open Source Software development projects, making it an attractive data source for software engineering research. However it is not without...

Towards a portfolio of FLOSS project success measures (2004)

Kevin Crowston, Hala Annabi, James Howison, Chengetai Masango

Project success is one of the most widely used dependent variables in information systems research. However, conventional measures of project success are difficult to apply to Free/Libre Open Source...

A Framework for Creating a Facetted Classification for Genres: Addressing Issues of Multidimensionality (2004)

Kevin Crowston, Barbara H. Kwasnik

People recognize and use document genres as a way of identifying useful information and of participating in mutually understood communicative acts. Crowston and Kwasnik [1] discuss the possibility of...

Coordination Theory (2004)

Kevin Crowston, Joseph Rubleske, James Howison

Since the initial publication in 1994, Coordination Theory (Malone and Crowston, 1994) has been referenced in nearly 300 journal articles, book chapters, conference papers and theses. This chapter...

Effective Work Practices for Software Engineering: Free/Libre Open Source Software Development (2004)

Kevin Crowston, Hala Annabi

We review the literature on Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) development and on software development, distributed work and teams more generally to develop a theoretical model to explain the...

Coordination Theory: A Ten-Year Retrospective (2004)

Kevin Crowston, Joseph Rubleske, James Howison

Since the initial publication in 1994, Coordination Theory (Malone and Crowston, 1994) has been referenced in nearly 300 journal articles, book chapters, conference papers and theses. This chapter...

Coordination practices within floss development teams The bug fixing process (2004)

Kevin Crowston, Barbara Scozzi

Abstract. Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) is primarily developed by distributed teams. Developers contribute from around the world and coordinate their activity almost exclusively by means of...

There is a pervasive perception that Free/Libre and Open Source So... (2004)

Kevin Crowston, James Howison

Metaphors, such as the Cathedral and Bazaar, used to describe the organization of FLOSS projects typically place them in sharp contrast to proprietary development by emphasizing FLOSS’s distinctive...

A Framework for Creating a Facetted Classification for Genres: Addressing Issues of Multidimensionality (2004)

Kevin Crowston, Barbara H. Kwasnik

People recognize and use document genres as a way of identifying useful information and of participating in mutually understood communicative acts. Crowston and Kwasnik [1] discuss the possibility of...

Defining open source software project success (2003)

Kevin Crowston, Hala Annabi, James Howison

Information systems success is one of the most widely used dependent variables in information systems research. In this paper, we identify a range of measures that can be used to assess the success...

The social structure of open source software development teams (2003)

Kevin Crowston, James Howison

Please do not cite or quote The social structure of Open Source Software development teams Open Source Software development teams provide an interesting and convenient setting for studying...

The Paradox of discontinuities: Flexibility and sensemaking (2003)

Katherine M. Chudoba, Kevin Crowston

Today’s work environment is complex and challenging for workers. Organizations are increasingly focused on collaboration and seek the advantages of flexibility to facilitate innovation. In many...

Exploring Strengths and Limits on Open Source Software Engineering Processes: A Research Agenda (2002)

Kevin Crowston

Many researchers have investigated the nature and characteristics of open source software (OSS) projects and their developer communities. In this position paper, after examining some success factors,...

Discontinuities and continuities: A new way to understand virtual work (2002)

Kevin Crowston, Katherine M. Chudoba

Discontinuities and Continuities: A New Way to Understand Virtual Work “Virtual ” is a potent buzzword, freely applied to many situations, with many meanings. In this exploratory study, we...

Discontinuities and continuities: A new way to understand virtual work (2002)

Katherine M. Chudoba, Kevin Crowston

Abstract ``Virtual’ ’ is a potent buzzword, freely applied to many situations, with many meanings. In this exploratory study, we develop a more precise understanding of ``virtual’ ’ to...

Genre Based Navigation on the Web (2001)

Dmitri Roussinov, Kevin Crowston, Mike Nilan, Barbara Kwasnik, Jin Cai, Xiaoyong Liu

We report on our ongoing study of using the genre of Web pages to facilitate information exploration. By genre, we mean socially recognized regularities of form and purpose in documents (e.g., a...

Information and communication technologies in the real estate industry: Results of a pilot survey (2001)

Rolf T. Wigand, Rolf T. Wig, Rolf T. Wig, Kevin Crowston, Kevin Crowston, Kevin Crowston, ...

We have been studying the growing use of information and communication technologies (ICT) in the residential real estate industry and the effects of this use on how realtors work. Earlier stages of...

Investigating the interplay between structure and technology in the real estate industry (2001)

Kevin Crowston, Steve Sawyer, Burrowes St, Rolf Wigand

Information and communication technologies (ICTs) are reshaping many industries, often by reshaping how information is shared. Informationintensive industries, by their nature, show the greatest...

A process theory of competency rallying in engineering projects (2000)

Bernhard R. Katzy, Kevin Crowston

thank all of the participants in the Virtual Factory project for their contributions and in particular, for the many discussions that led to the concepts discussed in this paper. The authors take...

Processes as theory in information systems research (2000)

Kevin Crowston

Many researchers have searched for evidence of organizational improvements from the huge sums invested in ICT. Unfortunately, evidence for such a pay back is spotty at best (e.g., Brynjolfsson 1994;...

Real Estate War in Cyberspace: An Emerging Electronic Market? (1999)

Kevin Crowston, Rolf T. Wigand

In this paper, we explore how electronic commerce, the World-Wide Web in particular, is affecting the real estate industry. Real estate is a promising setting for studying electronic commerce because...

Tools for Inventing Organizations: Toward a Handbook of Organizational Processes (1999)

Thomas W. Malone, Kevin Crowston, Jintae Lee, Brian Pentland, Chrysanthos Dellarocas, George Wyner, ...

This paper reports on the first five years of work in a project to address these problems by (1) developing methodologies and software tools for representing and codifying organizational processes at...

Real Estate War in Cyberspace: An Emerging Electronic Market? (1999)

Kevin Crowston, Rolf T. Wigand

In this paper, we explore how electronic commerce, the World-Wide Web in particular, is affecting the real estate industry. Real estate is a promising setting for studying electronic commerce because...

The Effects of Linking on Genres of Web Documents (1999)

Kevin Crowston, Marie Williams

Documents on the Web can be composed of multiple Web pages, suggesting the need to consider how linking between pages affects a document's form. We illustrate this point by considering patterns...

The Effects of Market-Enabling Internet Agents on Competition and Prices: A Model and Empirical Evidence,” Working Paper (1998)

Kevin Crowston, Ian Macinnes

The Internet offers a vision of ubiquitous electronic commerce. A particularly useful feature is the ability to automate the search for price or other information across multiple vendors by using an...

The Effects of Market-Enabling Internet Agents on Competition and Prices: A Model and Empirical Evidence,” Working Paper (1998)

Kevin Crowston, Ian Macinnes

The Internet offers a vision of ubiquitous electronic commerce. A particularly useful feature is the ability to automate the search for price or other information across multiple vendors by using an...

Price Behavior In A Market With (1997)

Internet Buyer's Agents, Kevin Crowston

l products examined. For CDs, one vendor was cheapest for 31 of the 55 albums it offered, while another seven were cheapest for none. Interestingly, there was some evidence of specialization---three...

Reproduced and emergent genres of communication on the World-Wide Web (1997)

Kevin Crowston, Marie Williams

The World Wide Web is growing quickly and being applied to many new types of communications. As a basis for studying organizational communications, Yates and Orlikowski (1992; Orlikowski & Yates,...

Reproduced and emergent genres of communication on the World-Wide Web (1997)

Kevin Crowston

The World-Wide Web is growing quickly and being applied to many new types of communications. As a basis for studying organizational communications, Yates and Orlikowski [1, 2] proposed using genres....

The interdisciplinary study of coordination (1994)

Thomas W. Malone, Kevin Crowston

This survey characterizes an emerging research area, sometimes called coordination theory, that focuses on the interdisciplinary study of coordination. Research in this area uses and extends ideas...

Tools for Inventing Organizations: Toward a Handbook of Organizational Processes (1993)

Thomas W. Malone, Thomas W. Malone, Kevin Crowston, Kevin Crowston, Jintae Lee, Jintae Lee, ...

This paper describes a new project intended to provide a firmer theoretical and empirical foundation for such tasks as enterprise modeling, enterprise integration, and process re-engineering. The...

Forthcoming in ACM Computing Surveys. The Interdisciplinary Study of Coordination (1993)

Thomas Malone, Kevin Crowston, Thomas W. Malone, Kevin Crowston

1.1. A motivating question............................................................... 1 1.2. How can we proceed?........................................................... 2

Towards a coordination cookbook--recipes for multi-agent action (1991)

Crowston, Kevin

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management, 1991.

Towards a coordination cookbook--recipes for multi-agent action / (1991)

Crowston, Kevin.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management, 1991.

Towards a coordination cookbook--recipes for multi-agent action (1991)

Crowston, Kevin

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management, 1991.

Table of Contents (1991)

Thomas W. Malone, Kevin Crowston

2. COORDINATION THEORY.................................................................... 2 2.1. What is...

What is coordination theory and how can it help design cooperative work systems (1990)

Thomas W. Malone, Thomas W. Malone, Kevin Crowston, Kevin Crowston

It is possible to design cooperative work tools based only on "common sense " and good intuitions. But the history of technology is replete with examples of good theories greatly...

How Do Experienced Information Lens Users Use Rules (1989)

Wendy E. Mackay, Thomas W. Malone, Kevin Crowston, Ramana Rao, David Rosenblitt, Stuart K. Card, ...

The Information Lens system provides electronic mail users with the ability to write rules that automatically sort, select, and filter their messages. This paper describes preliminary results from an...

Emergent Decision-Making Practices in Free/Libre Open Source Software (Floss) Development Teams (1970)

Robert Heckman, Kevin Crowston, U. Yeliz Eseryel, James Howison, Eileen Allen, Qing Li

We seek to identify work practices that make Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) development teams effective. Particularly important to team effectiveness is decision making. In this paper, we...

Data and analyses sharing to support research on free/libre open source software A Debate (1970)

Evangelia Berdou, Kevin Crowston, Greg Madey, Megan Conklin, Stefan Koch, Walt Scacchi

Research on FLOSS has relied on several different kinds of scientific evidence, such as the archives created by the FLOSS developers, versioned code repositories, mailing list messages and bug and...

Social Dynamics of FLOSS Team Communication Across Channels (1970)

Andrea Wiggins, James Howison, Kevin Crowston

This paper extends prior investigation into the social dynamics of free and open source (FLOSS) teams by examining the methodological questions arising from research using social network analysis on...

Social dynamics of free and open source team communications (1970)

James Howison, Keisuke Inoue, Kevin Crowston

This paper furthers inquiry into the social structure of free and open source software (FLOSS) teams by undertaking social network analysis across time. Contrary to expectations, we confirmed earlier...

The role of mental models in FLOSS development work practices (1970)

Kevin Crowston, Barbara Scozzi

Shared understandings are important for software development as they guide to effective individual contributions to, and coordination of, the software development process. In this paper, we present...

From Individual Contribution to Group Learning the Early Years of Apache Web Server (1970)

Hala Annabi, Kevin Crowston, Robert Heckman

Open Source Software (OSS) groups experience many benefits and challenges with respect to the core groups effectiveness. In order to capitalize on the benefits and minimize the challenges, OSS groups...

What is coordination theory and how can it help design cooperative work systems

Malone, Thomas W., Crowston, Kevin.

"Appears in Proceedings of the Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, Los Angeles, California, October, 1990."

The interdisciplinary study of coordination

Malone, Thomas W., Crowston, Kevin.

Includes bibliographical references (p. 43-53).

Toward a handbook of organizational processes

Thomas W. Malone, Kevin Crowston, Jintae Lee, Brian Pentland, Chrysanthos Dellarocas, George Wyner, ...

Revised October 1998 This paper describes a novel theoretical and empirical approach to tasks such as business process redesign and knowledge management. The project involves collecting examples of...

Tools for inventing organizations: Toward a handbook of organizational processes

Thomas W. Malone, Kevin Crowston, Jintae Lee, Brian Pentland

This paper describes a new project intended to provide a firmer theoretical and empirical foundation for such tasks as enterprise modeling, enterprise integration, and process re-engineering. The...

The Interdisciplinary Study of Coordination

Thomas W. Malone, Kevin Crowston

This paper characterizes an emerging research area, sometimes called coordination theory , that focuses on the interdisciplinary study of coordination. Research in this area uses and extends ideas...

A Taxonomy of Organizational Dependencies and Coordination Mechanisms.

Kevin Crowston

Interdependency and coordination have been perennial topics in organization studies. The two are related because coordination is seen as a response to problems caused by dependencies. Past studies,...

Electronic communication and new organizational forms: A coordination theory approach.

Kevin Crowston

Describing and categorizing organizational forms remains a central problem in organization theory. Unfortunately defining organizational form poses numerous difficulties. Rather than attempting to...

Evolving Novel Organizational Forms

Kevin Crowston

A key problem in organization theory is to suggest new organizational forms. In this paper, I suggest the use of genetic algorithms to search for novel organizational forms by reproducing some of the...

Tools for inventing organizations: Toward a handbook of organizational processes

Thomas W. Malone, Kevin Crowston, Jintae Lee, Brian Pentland, Chrysanthos Dellarocas, George Wyner, ...

This paper describes a novel theoretical and empirical approach to tasks such as business process redesign, enterprise modeling, and software development. The project involves collecting examples of...

Organizing Business Knowledge: The MIT Process Handbook

Thomas W. Malone, Kevin Crowston, George A. Herman

The vision of the MIT Process Handbook Project is the creation of a systematic and powerful method of organizing and sharing business knowledge. Organizing Business Knowledge: The MIT Process...