Claudia Patricia Ayala Martínez

Managing risk in open source software adoption

By 2016 an estimated 95% of all commercial software packages will include Open Source Software (OSS). This extended adoption is yet not avoiding failure rates in OSS projects to be as high as 50%. Inadequate risk management has been identified among the top mistakes to avoid when implementing OSS-based solutions. Understanding, managing and mitigating OSS adoption risks is therefore crucial to avoid potentially significant adverse impact on the business. In this position paper we portray a short report of work in progress on risk management in OSS adoption processes. We present a risk-aware technical decision-making management platform integrated in a business-oriented decision-making framework, which together support placing technical OSS adoption decisions into organizational, business strategy as well as the broader OSS community context. The platform will be validated against a collection of use cases coming from different types of organizations: big companies, SMEs, public administration, consolidated OSS communities and emergent small OSS products.

Vector Consensus: Decision Making for Collaborative Innovation Communities

To achieve a general agreement in relation to a specific proposal, members of a community must participate in the formal consensus process. This paper describes a web-based system (the Vector Consensus system) for supporting an ad hoc consensus process. The system was implemented in a collaborative innovation community with the aim to discuss how this organization understands some drivers affecting collaboration practices. The results have shown that Vector Consensus system enhance ultimate consensus and canalize personal contributions to the organization. Furthermore, the possibility to compare the one’s personal opinion with respect to the rest of the community, given as a real-time feedback, appeared to have a positive impact on the group, augmenting the context knowledge awareness.