Open Collaboration and Peer Production

This course is a hands-on exploration of the theory and practice of open online collaboration. Students will engage multi­disciplinary literature about collaboration while contributing to an existing open project (such as open source software, Wikipedia, or OpenStreetMap). Readings will explore business models for open source software organizations, incentives of cooperation and organization design for open source projects. Practical work will be organized around themes of project management infrastructure, community self-governance, and engineering education through open source participation. The goal of the class is to engage students in an existing open source community while developing functionality and expertise that can be part of masters final projects, faculty-­directed research, and beyond.