Today I studied a little bit Red Hat’s and Georgia Tech’s Open Source Software Potential Index. The nice map illustrates the international adoption of open source software (OSS) in the three different areas: government, industry, and community. As their scientific paper describes data was drawn from an enormously broad range of sources.

So I took the country rankings and ordered them by government adoption (which is interesting to me at the moment). As can be seen in the table (PDF, ODS, XLS), Switzerland falls back extremely far. While being 22nd in the overall ranking (which already is very bad considering being 7th in the ICT environment), the government’s OSS adoption is on rank 34. As can be seen in the data, there is only one lower rank, 45. Thus we’re basically second last in worldwide OSS adoption, a real developing country - one more reason to help our public administrators a little bit in their efforts procuring software in a way that enables OSS solutions as well…

In case you want to learn how to convince your fellows installing Ubuntu, have a look at this great Japanese comic - translated completely with open source software only! (source files)

Thanks to ETH Life I can now send my mom a link which describes the content of one my dissertation papers! Maybe now that she understands what I was doing the last three years she’ll forgive me that I didn’t study meteorology but some nerdy geeks ;)

Why volunteers are programming for Nokia free of charge
Nokia has had volunteer developers carry out parts of the programming for one of its new devices. The developers worked free of charge, and in return Nokia had to offer up some of its trade secrets. A study carried out by ETH Zurich examines whether this is a win-win situation for both parties and looks at the motivation on both sides.

Warum Freiwillige gratis für Nokia programmieren
Für ein neues Gerät liess Nokia Programmteile von freiwilligen Entwicklern entwerfen. Diese arbeiteten gratis, dafür musste Nokia Einblick in Betriebsgeheimnisse gewähren. Eine ETH-Studie untersucht, ob das eine Win-win-Situation für beide ist und welche Motivation für beide Parteien dahinter steckt.

Our Nokia article was at the ETH Life front page during an entire day:

The open source evangelization based on the content in the OSS Whitepaper continues with a presentation at the InfoSocietyDays in Bern in the E-Government Track…

…and with an article in the InfoWeek issue on open source software:

Today is a great day: the 2500 issues of our new open source image brochure were delivered - 300kg of dead trees…! The freshly designed 16p whitepaper with 13 statements of Swiss ICT celebrities can be downloaded for free or ordered for CHF 10.00 per copy from the /ch/open website. Now let’s assail policy makers with our open source software marketing campaign!

Have you ever found an interesting book on Google Books and missed the “Download as PDF” button?? Google Book Downloader is a new little open source program which does exactly this (only for educational purposes of course ;) So now I finally can read the book chapter of Tim O’Reilly “The Open Source Paradigm Shift” also offline as PDF (sidenote: I don’t think that Tim O’Reilly thought how far the paradigm shift would go and that today - thanks to open source software - one can download this book for free whereby challenging his business model at the core…).

Drawbacks: Google Book Downloader needs Windows, you have to install some ugly .NET framework in order to run it and on my Windows VirtualBox installation on Ubuntu it always crashes before being able to download the pages. Therefore, a Linux version of the application or debugging of this issue would be much appreciated.

Usually I’m not really camera-shy, but in the case of our SMI video abstracts Stefan had to push me almost three years until I finally did my first recording this afternoon. So here it is, the short 1min teaser for our new paper “Extending Private-Collective Innovation: A case study” soon to be published in R&D Management!

Authors: Matthias Stuermer, Sebastian Spaeth, and Georg von Krogh (all ETH Zurich)

Abstract: The private-collective innovation model proposes incentives for individuals and firms to privately invest resources to create public goods innovations. Such innovations are characterized by non-rivalry and non-exclusivity in consumption. Examples include open source software, user-generated media products, drug formulas, and sport equipment designs. There is still limited empirical research on private-collective innovation. We present a case study to 1) provide empirical evidence of a case of private-collective innovation, showing specific benefits, and 2) to extend the private-collective innovation model by analyzing the hidden costs for the company involved. We examine the development of the Nokia Internet Tablet, that builds on both proprietary and open source software development, and that involves both Nokia developers and volunteers who are not employed by the company. Seven benefits for Nokia are identified, as are five hidden costs: difficulty to differentiate, guarding business secrets, reducing community entry barriers, giving up control, and organizational inertia. We examine actions taken by the management to mitigate these costs throughout the development period.

Last November my core PhD thesis project took place: We sent out a large-scaled survey into the open source communities of Maemo and Openmoko.

After doing almost 30 interviews and writing a qualitative paper on the Private-Collective Model of Innovation I really wanted to do some hard stats ;) Today we finally published the raw results of the 1233 respondents revealing quite interesting insights into these heterogenous communities.

Already by looking at the descriptive statistics we see some significant differences between these two communities: E.g. people seem more happy with Openmoko Inc.’s information policy than with Nokia’s secretness. Answering [Nokia resp. Openmoko Inc. is secretive about future plans of Maemo resp. Openmoko.] 46.2% of the Maemo community responded “strongly agree” or “agree” vs. 26.6% in the Openmoko community. Might this be a cause why the average number of hours contributed per week is lower in the Maemo (4.5h) vs. the Openmoko (5.1h) community?

Really insightful results will show us our Structural Equation Modeling on which Sebastian is working heavily these days using R. Let’s hope we finish the paper before the end of my dissertation mid 2009…

Update 2009-01-16: Great, our research seems to be notified and actually read by some of the community members ;)

The last two days we - our SMI team together with the Chair of Prof. Pius Baschera - spent in the hotel Morteratsch almost 2000m above sea-level close to Pontresina. We discussed intensively our PhD projects (doctoral students), research experiences (post-docs) and practical insights (Prof. Baschera as chairman of Hilti and member of the board of Roche, Schindler, Vorwerk and Ardex) and learned a lot from each other. Particularly I got to understand the concept of Business Model Innovation and the idea of phenomenon-based research agendas.

Luckily the weather was great so we could also do a little walk almost up to the Morteratsch glacier which demonstrates clearly the climate change issue.

As my political career still has to wait a little bit, I decided today to concentrate on my academic profession. By reading all day and preparing for this week’s doctoral seminar I thought a little physical motion would probably support the intellectual activity. Thus I took my new first class Generalabonnement for doctoral students and travelled 540km from Bern (9.02h) to Zürich (10.09h) to Locarno (14.12h) to Domodossola (16.10h) to Bern (17.54h) - a very recommendable round trip especially because it’s possible to spend most of the time in panorama waggons. That’s why I even survived reading Georg’s toughest paper “An Essay on Corporate Epistemology” ;)

Google Map of the 540km trip

Frozen valley outside the warm panorama waggon

Palm trees in Ticino

Reading Marotto, Roos and Victor (2007) ‘Collective Virtuosity in Organizations: A Study of Peak Performance in an Orchestra’

Winter in Creggio