Design for Interpreting the Innovation Occuring Within a Free/Open Source Software Development Community

Organizations that sell products and services related to free/open source software (FOSS) have an interest in the development community that produces that software. This paper proposes a design theory for an information system that tracks the innovation of a FOSS development community. The design theory is constructed using Information System Design Theory (Walls, Widmeyer, & El Sawy, 1992) and is based upon three kernel theories: one that describes six design principles that support distributed cognition (Boland, Tenkasi, & Te\u27eni, 1994), one that provides factors found to contribute to successful innovation (Brown & Eisenhardt, 1997), and one that provides a framework for analyzing the FOSS development approach (Feller & Fitzgerald, 2000). A system based upon this design is argued to be beneficial for an organization that places a high value on information about a given FOSS development community