Open Source Software and Organisational Boundaries: Interview Data, 2023

Taylor, Rebecca and Weal, Mark and Quinn, Anthony (2025). Open Source Software and Organisational Boundaries: Interview Data, 2023. [Data Collection]. Colchester, Essex: UK Data Service. 10.5255/UKDA-SN-857869

The Digital Futures at Work Research Centre (Dig.IT) will establish itself as an essential resource for those wanting to understand how new digital technologies are profoundly reshaping the world of work. Digitalisation is a topical feature of contemporary debate. For evangelists, technology offers new opportunities for those seeking work and increased flexibility and autonomy for those in work. More pessimistic visions, in contrast, see a future where jobs are either destroyed by robots or degraded through increasingly precarious contracts and computerised monitoring. Take Uber as an example: the company claims it is creating opportunities for self-employed entrepreneurs; while workers' groups increasingly challenge such claims through legal means to improve their rights at work.

While such positive and pessimistic scenarios abound of an increasingly fragmented, digitalised and flexible transformation of work across the globe, theoretical understanding of contemporary developments remains underdeveloped and systematic empirical analyses are lacking. We know, for example, that employers and governments are struggling to cope with and understand the pace and consequences of digital change, while individuals face new uncertainties over how to become and stay 'connected' in turbulent labour markets. Yet, we have no real understanding of what it means to be a 'connected worker' in an increasing 'connected' economy. Drawing resources from different academic fields of study, Dig.IT will provide an empirically innovative and international broad body of knowledge that will offer authoritative insights into the impact of digitalisation on the future of work.

The Dig.IT centre will be jointly led by the Universities of Sussex and Leeds, supported by leading experts from Aberdeen, Cambridge, Manchester and Monash Universities. Its core research programme will cover four broad-ranging research themes. Theme one will set the conceptual and quantitative base for the centre's activities. Theme two involves a large-scale survey of Employers' Digital Practices at Work. Theme three involves qualitative research on employers' and employees' experiences of digitalisation at work across 4 sectors (Creative industries, Business Services, Consumer Services, Public Services). Theme 4 examines how the disconnected attempt to reconnect, through Public Employment Services, the growth of new types of self-employment, platform work and workers' responses to building new forms of voice and representation in an international context. Specific projects include:

1. The Impact of Digitalisation on Work and Employment
-Conceptualising digital futures, historically, regionally and internationally
-Comparative regulation of digital employment
- Mapping regional and international trends of digital technology and work

2. Employers' Digital Practices at Work Survey

3. Employers' and employees' experiences of digital work across sectors
-Changing management processes and practices
-Workers' experiences of digital transformation

4. Reconnecting the disconnected: new channels of voice and representation
- displaced workers, job search and the public employment service
- self-employment, interest representation and voice

Dig.IT will establish a Data Observatory on digital futures at work to promote our findings through an interactive website, report on a series of methodological seminars and new experimental methods and deliver extensive outreach activities. It will act as a one-platform library of resources at the forefront of research on digital work and will establish itself as a focal point for decision-makers across the policy spectrum, connecting with industrial strategy, employment and welfare policy. It will also manage an Innovation Fund designed to fund novel research ideas, from across the academic community as they emerge over the life course of the centre.

Data description (abstract)

The development of business products and services underpinned by open source (OS) software and digital infrastructure is widespread. This raises important questions about how that work is resourced and managed within and beyond organisational boundaries. Our study explored how Open Source is located within organisations from both public and commercial sectors and the implications of this for work practices and organisational models. It aimed to provide valuable insights into both the sustainability of OS digital infrastructure and how digital technologies are transforming work in diverse ways. We set out to understand where, why and how organisations from different sectors develop open source software and digital infrastructure as part of their delivery of products and services. And how staff work to develop products and services and maintain OS digital infrastructure within and beyond organisational boundaries.

Our methods involved qualitative interviews to explore different experiences of open source. Innovative web-scraping, online research and snowball techniques were used to purposively identify organisations that were aware of and using open source. We conducted 20 online interviews with staff from organisations in four broad fields across the public and commercial sectors; global technology corporations, UK public sector (local government), UK Higher education, and Open Source first companies. Interviewees were mostly senior technical staff managing the development of products and services. Key informant interviews were conducted with those in open source community and policy roles. Transcripts were pseudonymised and imported into Nvivo and coded thematically using both inductive and deductive codes.

Our key findings in the first stage of analysis focused on providing a comparative picture of the 4 groups of organisations, the location of open source, its role in the delivery of products and services and organisational infrastructure, how open source was used and maintained, and where contributions were made to communities. Emerging themes indicated the embedding of open source in the commercial global technology industry with various structures set up internally to support communities and manage licencing and contributions. OS first organisations had put open development at the heart of their mission creating innovative practices and organisational structures to facilitate community support and contribution. In the public sector open source was used in an ad hoc way by universities and local authorities, but increasingly off the shelf-products with support packages had taken precedence as a result of resourcing crises and concerns about risk compatibility and disruption caused by implementation. Further analysis will be looking in detail at structures and models that facilitate or prevent work beyond organisational boundaries and the implications of these new ways of working for the future of work. As such the research contributes to Digit’s goal of understanding how digital technologies are transforming work and the theme of Employers’ and employees’ experiences of digital work across sectors.

The data collections consists of 17 interview transcripts with workers in four industries UKHE, Global Technology Corporations, UK public sector bodies and Open source first organisations.

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