Group Decision Making in OSS: A Dialectic Perspective on Herding

Herding behavior in group (collaborative) decision making has been studied purely as imitation of others and discounting own information. However, collaboration is a dynamic process and decision making should be viewed with this dynamic in mind. Drawing on the The Laws of Imitation from sociology, we offer a new perspective to understand herding behavior in group decision making. By acknowledging the tension between imitation (respectively counter-imitation) and invention, we conceptualize herd behavior as a dialectic process. This research-in-progress aims at offering a theoretical framework for explaining the dialectic relation between imitation (respectively counter-imitation) and invention. We describe the dialectic process of problem-solving using cases from GitHub. Our research contributes to existing literature by acknowledging that before convergence towards a solution i.e. herding as an outcome, there is a dialectic process. We are offering a research model for dialectic problem-solving within OSS context