Understanding Openness and Diversity in Digital Environments

Leonhard Dobusch 
University of Innsbruck
Guest Lecture in the course „Understanding the digital economy“ 
December 18, 2019, Johannes Kepler University Linz
OPENNESS AS AN ORGANIZING PRINCIPLE 
Open for Diversity or Exclusionary Openness?

CO
M
M
ERCIAL
BREAK
Dobusch, L. & Dobusch, L. (2019): The
Relation between Openness and Closure
in Open Strategy: Programmatic and
Constitutive Approaches to Openness. In
D. Seidl, G. von Krogh & R Whittington
(eds.), The Cambridge Handbook of
Open Strategy. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 326-336

Openness as an Organizing Principle

11 EIRMA SIG III, 2005-10-20
Closed innovation
Our current
market
Our new
market
Other firm´s
market
Open innovation
External technology
insourcing
Internal
technology base
External technology base
Stolen with pride from Prof Henry Chesbrough UC Berkeley, Open Innovation: Renewing Growth from
Industrial R&D, 10th Annual Innovation Convergence, Minneapolis Sept 27, 2004
Internal/external
venture handling
Licence, spin
out, divest

a lesser extent in the arts and humanities).
0
50
100
150
200
250
2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011
All SSCI B/M
Figure 1.2 Growth of publications on open innovation in Web of Science
Notes: Search criterion: “open innovation” in title, abstract or keyword or citing Chesbrough (2003a); All = SCI,
SSCI and A&HCI; SSCI = Social Science Citation Index; B/M = Business or Management category (within SSCI)

Open Innovation and
Strategy
Henry W. Chesbrough
Melissa M. Appleyard
A
new breed of innovation—open innovation—is forcing firms to
reassess their leadership positions, which reflect the performance
outcomes of their business strategies. It is timely to juxtapose
some new phenomena in innovation with the traditional acade-
mic view of business strategy. More specifically, we wish to examine the increas-
ing adoption of more open approaches to innovation, and see how well this
adoption can be explained with theories of business strategy. In our view, open
innovation is creating new empirical phenomena that exist uneasily with well-
established theories of business strategy. Traditional business strategy has guidedQuelle: David Lerner, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Internet_troll.jpg, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
Open strategy … embraces
the benefits of openness as a
means of expanding value
creation for organizations
“ Chesbrough & Appleyard (2007)

Impression
Digital Openness of Organizations
Example: Buffer

Impression
Tool

Bild: Chris Potter, CC-BY 2.0, https://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/86530412@N02/8334443952
Impression
Tool
Value

Quelle: David Lerner, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Internet_troll.jpg, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
Increasing Openness as a PROGRAM
Tensions such as
“compromising speed” or
“burdening wider audiences
with the pressures of
strategy” (Hautz et al., 2017) as
limitations or hurdles for
achieving greater openness
IIIOpenness as the opposite  
of closure, representing two
endpoints of a continuum
from closed to open:
Inviting more actors, sharing
more information >> open++
open++ as a normative ideal

“Open forms of strategy-making with
more inside and outside
organizations and more of
different actors internally and externally.
Whittington et al. (2011, S.
531, Übersetzung L.D.)
transparency
inclusion

surveys dialogue ratinginformation
transparency inclusion

How are openness and diversity connected?

How connected are openness and diversity?

Survey of 5.500 open source
developers on Github:
95% male, 3% female
(in comparison: ~20% of all
professional developers in the
USA are female)
Quellen: http://opensourcesurvey.org/2017/; https://www.wired.com/2017/06/diversity-open-source-even-worse-tech-overall/

Quelle: http://www.taz.de/!5127514/

Quelle: http://derstandard.at/2000022296889/Studie-Wikipedia-wird-vom-reichen-Westen-dominiert

Quelle: http://www.tagesanzeiger.ch/leben/gesellschaft/Der-Schwarm-bei-Wikipedia-schrumpft/story/11486176

Non-performativity of Openness?

Non-performatives
describes the “reiterative
and citational practice by
which discourse” does not
produce “the effects that it
names” (Butler 1993: 2)
“
Ahmed, S. (2012, p. 117)

Bild ShashiBellamkonda, CC BY 2.0, : https://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/drbeachvacation/4623702054/

Why is open for "anyone" not open enough?

Photo: UNESCO, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Online_harassment_of_women_journalists.png. CC BY-SA 4.0

“non-anonymous
individuals are more
aggressive compared
to anonymous
individuals
Rost et al. (2016): Digital Social Norm
Enforcement: Online Firestorms in Social
Media, http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/
journal.pone.0155923

Lack of diversity in spite of radical openness?
because of

Bild: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Being_any_Gender_is_a_drag_-_World_Pride_London_2012_(7527764372).jpg,, CC BY 2.0, by xJason.Rogersx
Mirror of societal (gender) structures and inequalities?

Quelle: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wikipedia_Zero_1_Mumbai_Guy_on_phone.jpg
Mirror of societal (gender) structures and inequalities?

Usability: Wiki-Syntax
Quelle: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Editing_Wikipedia_p_11,_wiki_markup_illustration_1.png

0
25
50
75
100
2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012
editcountinpercentperyearineachusergroup
Anonymous users Bots
Registered users
More edits of
algorithms
(»bots«):
Aus: Müller-Birn, C./Dobusch, L./Herbsleb, J. D. (2013): Work-to-
rule: the emergence of algorithmic governance in Wikipedia.
Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Communities
and Technologies (C&T ’13), ACM, 80–89.

If your group has nine helpful
and polite members, and one
rude, sexist, loud member,
most women are going to
continue to stay away because
of that one member
“
Valeria Aurora (2002),
http://tldp.org/HOWTO/
Encourage-Women-
Linux-HOWTO/

Path dependence of (lack of) diversity?
Quelle: Sydow et al. (2009, p. 692)

Wikipedia-
specific
Societal
Closedness
Potential reasons  
for exclusion  
in Wikipedia
Hacker culture
Trolls
»Bots«
0
25
50
75
100
2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012
Registered users
Figure 3: Development of edits per user group (registered user,
anonymous user, bot) in the Wikipedia’s administrative names-
pace 4.
continuously increasing in number. Since bots have shown their
usefulness for a wide variety of tasks in the main namespace, their
scope has steadily expanded, and more edits have taken place in
other namespaces.
This contradicts a community guideline that suggests the avoidance
of editing activities of bots outside the article namespace. However,
in 2012, these “outside” edits accounted for over 40 percent of all
bot edits. This emergence of bot activity all over the community
project is an indication of the growing importance of these “lit-
tle helpers” for the community’s activities. This relates to a study
that analyzed the diversification of human edits over the different
namespaces. In 2001, about 90 percent of all edits were carried
out in the article namespace, but in 2006, this number had already
decreased to 70 percent [15]. We assume that the change in the
community engagement of bot operators also expanded the reach
of bot edits. More interestingly, while human edits slowed down in
Wikipedia’s community space, edits carried out by bots increased
as shown in Figure 3. In this administrative space, 20 different bots
have been active on average (disregarding wikilink-bots).
In the next part of our analysis, we specifically look at the types of
activities bots carry out. Our interest is twofold: first, we classify
tasks executed by bots in order to understand their relatedness to
existing social governance mechanisms. Second, we examine our
assumption of increasingly algorithmic rule enforcement by bots.
We collected task descriptions from bots’ user pages to examine
the kinds of activities in which bots are participating in the Wiki-
pedia community. In single, doubtful cases we matched edits with
their task descriptions to identify discrepancies and exclude those
activities. Based on these data, we defined general activity types
that are indicated in the first column of the table 1. These general
activity types were defined in three steps. During the first round,
we coded existing task descriptions collaboratively (around 100)
until we had an almost stable set of activities. In the second round,
we separately coded the remaining task descriptions. In the third
round, we checked the assigned codes and compared them with
our own decisions, and collaboratively coded all task descriptions
that needed new activity types. In order to create a shared under-
standing of existing activity types, the second and third rounds were
an iterative process. Newly introduced activity types were always
cross-validated over the whole data set.
We clustered the manually defined sets of activities in activity types
(cf. second column of the table 1) and identified three foci of bot
activities (cf. fifth column of the table 1): (1) the content focus, (2)
the task focus, and (3) the community focus.
The first category contains mainly bots that are active in the article
namespace. These bots are created primarily to support the curat-
ing activities of their operators (for example, by using Autowiki-
browser – a semi-automated MediaWiki editor13
) or to connect dif-
ferent language versions of a page through interwiki-links. The
second category comprises bots that are used to support the main-
tenance work of editors by compiling working lists or by informing
editors about existing status changes on articles. The third category
- the community focus - refers to activities that are rather unrelated
to encyclopedic articles; they are more related to community rules
and their enforcement.
Four bots have a community focus: the CopperBot, GiftBot, Items-
bot and xqbot. The CopperBot is the German equivalent to the
HagermanBot of the English Wikipedia [8] that is responsible for
signing unsigned comments on discussion pages. The main task of
the Itemsbot was welcoming new users to the German Wikipedia
by leaving a message on their personal discussion pages. Probably
because of the aforementioned community consensus against bot
welcome messages, the bot stopped working within two months.
In 2008 and 2009, the operator of the Giftbot requested a bot flag
for her bot in order to correct spelling mistakes. In both cases, the
request was denied. In July 2010, the third request was successful.
This time, the bot tasks included the removal of processed flagged
revision requests, the dissemination of a newsletter that contains
information on new edits on pages such as polls, and requests for
banning users as well. All these activities were much more fo-
cused on specific community needs. We assume that the operator
of Giftbot learned much more about existing rules and guidelines
over time and was therefore much better able to meet the needs of
her fellows.
The last of the four community bots is introduced in more detail in
the next section. We show in an exemplary way how the activity
set employed by this bot changes over time.
5.3.1 Example: xqbot
In October 2008, the editor applied for a bot flag for her xqbot in
order to request speedy deletions of orphan pages14
or remains of
moved pages. In November 2008, the bot flag was assigned and
the bot started working. Soon after this, the bot activities included
over ten different tasks such as correcting double redirects, fixing
links on disambiguation pages, adding missing references tags in
articles, and the setting of interwiki-links. All these tasks were
mainly focused on quality improvements to encyclopedic articles.
In 2010, the focus changed in terms of additional tasks. This was
motivated mainly by a procedural problem that occurred during an
administrator re-election.
In January 2010, one participant initiated a discussion by question-
ing the procedure to take care of obsolete votes [31], [32]. The
13
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:AutoWikiBrowse
14
Orphan pages on Wikipedia are articles that have no or very few
incoming links.
Usability
Mirror of societal structures
and relations
Access  
to Internet
Openness

Quelle: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Objective_Revision_Evaluation_Service_logo.svg
»Objective
Revision
Evaluation
Service«

»Objective
Revision
Evaluation
Service«
Quelle: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:ORES_edit_quality_ﬂow.svg

Wikipedia-
specific
Societal
Closedness
Potential reasons  
for exclusion  
in Wikipedia
Hacker culture
Trolls
»Bots«
0
25
50
75
100
2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012
Registered users
Figure 3: Development of edits per user group (registered user,
anonymous user, bot) in the Wikipedia’s administrative names-
pace 4.
continuously increasing in number. Since bots have shown their
usefulness for a wide variety of tasks in the main namespace, their
scope has steadily expanded, and more edits have taken place in
other namespaces.
This contradicts a community guideline that suggests the avoidance
of editing activities of bots outside the article namespace. However,
in 2012, these “outside” edits accounted for over 40 percent of all
bot edits. This emergence of bot activity all over the community
project is an indication of the growing importance of these “lit-
tle helpers” for the community’s activities. This relates to a study
that analyzed the diversification of human edits over the different
namespaces. In 2001, about 90 percent of all edits were carried
out in the article namespace, but in 2006, this number had already
decreased to 70 percent [15]. We assume that the change in the
community engagement of bot operators also expanded the reach
of bot edits. More interestingly, while human edits slowed down in
Wikipedia’s community space, edits carried out by bots increased
as shown in Figure 3. In this administrative space, 20 different bots
have been active on average (disregarding wikilink-bots).
In the next part of our analysis, we specifically look at the types of
activities bots carry out. Our interest is twofold: first, we classify
tasks executed by bots in order to understand their relatedness to
existing social governance mechanisms. Second, we examine our
assumption of increasingly algorithmic rule enforcement by bots.
We collected task descriptions from bots’ user pages to examine
the kinds of activities in which bots are participating in the Wiki-
pedia community. In single, doubtful cases we matched edits with
their task descriptions to identify discrepancies and exclude those
activities. Based on these data, we defined general activity types
that are indicated in the first column of the table 1. These general
activity types were defined in three steps. During the first round,
we coded existing task descriptions collaboratively (around 100)
until we had an almost stable set of activities. In the second round,
we separately coded the remaining task descriptions. In the third
round, we checked the assigned codes and compared them with
our own decisions, and collaboratively coded all task descriptions
that needed new activity types. In order to create a shared under-
standing of existing activity types, the second and third rounds were
an iterative process. Newly introduced activity types were always
cross-validated over the whole data set.
We clustered the manually defined sets of activities in activity types
(cf. second column of the table 1) and identified three foci of bot
activities (cf. fifth column of the table 1): (1) the content focus, (2)
the task focus, and (3) the community focus.
The first category contains mainly bots that are active in the article
namespace. These bots are created primarily to support the curat-
ing activities of their operators (for example, by using Autowiki-
browser – a semi-automated MediaWiki editor13
) or to connect dif-
ferent language versions of a page through interwiki-links. The
second category comprises bots that are used to support the main-
tenance work of editors by compiling working lists or by informing
editors about existing status changes on articles. The third category
- the community focus - refers to activities that are rather unrelated
to encyclopedic articles; they are more related to community rules
and their enforcement.
Four bots have a community focus: the CopperBot, GiftBot, Items-
bot and xqbot. The CopperBot is the German equivalent to the
HagermanBot of the English Wikipedia [8] that is responsible for
signing unsigned comments on discussion pages. The main task of
the Itemsbot was welcoming new users to the German Wikipedia
by leaving a message on their personal discussion pages. Probably
because of the aforementioned community consensus against bot
welcome messages, the bot stopped working within two months.
In 2008 and 2009, the operator of the Giftbot requested a bot flag
for her bot in order to correct spelling mistakes. In both cases, the
request was denied. In July 2010, the third request was successful.
This time, the bot tasks included the removal of processed flagged
revision requests, the dissemination of a newsletter that contains
information on new edits on pages such as polls, and requests for
banning users as well. All these activities were much more fo-
cused on specific community needs. We assume that the operator
of Giftbot learned much more about existing rules and guidelines
over time and was therefore much better able to meet the needs of
her fellows.
The last of the four community bots is introduced in more detail in
the next section. We show in an exemplary way how the activity
set employed by this bot changes over time.
5.3.1 Example: xqbot
In October 2008, the editor applied for a bot flag for her xqbot in
order to request speedy deletions of orphan pages14
or remains of
moved pages. In November 2008, the bot flag was assigned and
the bot started working. Soon after this, the bot activities included
over ten different tasks such as correcting double redirects, fixing
links on disambiguation pages, adding missing references tags in
articles, and the setting of interwiki-links. All these tasks were
mainly focused on quality improvements to encyclopedic articles.
In 2010, the focus changed in terms of additional tasks. This was
motivated mainly by a procedural problem that occurred during an
administrator re-election.
In January 2010, one participant initiated a discussion by question-
ing the procedure to take care of obsolete votes [31], [32]. The
13
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:AutoWikiBrowse
14
Orphan pages on Wikipedia are articles that have no or very few
incoming links.
Usability
Mirror of societal structures
and relations
Access  
to Internet
Openness
?

From radical openness to legitimate closure: 
Exclusion for the beneﬁt of openness?

Usage rights in the
English Wikipedia
none
all

Trademarks
Server infrastructure
Software development
Production of content
Deletion of content
Division of Labor  
Foundation/Community

Community
managers?

Openness and Closure as CONSTITUTIVE
Analyzing the paradoxical
nature of openness (and
closure) by focusing on
legitimate forms closure.
e.g., ofﬁcial secrecy as a way
to enhance transparency
(Costas & Grey 2014)
IIIOpenness and closure as
inextricably linked and
interacting with each other
>> we ﬁnd examples of
closure in all empirical
studies of open strategy

Explicating and addressing normativity inherent in (calls for) openness
from looking at degrees of openness to investigating combinations of
openness and closure desirable in organizations labelled as ‘open’
together with a switch
from exclusionary openness to inclusion through legitimate closure
allows moving

CONTACT
E-mail:  
Leonhard.Dobusch@uibk.ac.at
Twitter:
@leonidobusch
Websites: 
bit.ly/LD-UIBK // www.dobusch.net
Research blogs: 
governancexborders.com // osconjunction.net

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