Throughout the years my research has covered two main areas: 1. research and development (R&D), strategic alliances in particular; and 2. open-content communities, open-source software & Wikipedia in particular. Conceptually, I have mainly been focussing on trust, governance, and intellectual property rights (IPRs).
I started my research with a focus on R&D alliances between firms, in particular how relations of trust could be managed and inadvertent leaking of knowledge be prevented. Thereafter I gradually turned in another direction: the fascinating world of open source software, in which developers voluntarily share their code proposals and collectively develop them further. How is their cooperation governed, and how is the issue of possible misplacement of trust handled? Moreover, what conception of intellectual property rights is being developed in the process? As a next step, I enlarged my horizon to communities of open content in general – extending from open source software to social news sites, citizen journals, and reference works (Wikipedia in particular). And there again, I asked myself questions about trust and distrust, and about possible forms of governance. As a result, I was also drawn into a technical and ethical analysis of the anti-vandalism tools and bots as currently used in Wikipedia.
