EXPLORING THE KNOWLEDGE CREATING COMMUNITIES: AN ANALYSIS OF THE LINUX KERNEL DEVELOPER COMMUNITY HAOXIANG XIA * Institute of Systems Engineering, Dalian University of Technology, No.2, Linggong Road Dalian, 116024 China E-mail: hxxia@dlut.edu.cn SHUANGLING LUO and TAKETOSHI YOSHIDA Graduate School of Knowledge Science, Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology Nomi, Ishikawa 923-1292, Japan E-mails: {slluo, yoshida} @jaist.ac.jp The knowledge creation processes and activities in online communities become prominent in our society, with the proliferation of all sorts of online communities. This phenomenon brings enormous challenging research issues. In this paper, we give an in-depth analysis on an actual case of the Linux kernel developer community, to illustrate that such community is essentially an evolutionary collective-intelligent system; and this system grows through the spontaneous self-organization processes. This work may pave the way for further theoretical exploration of the knowledge-creation processes in online communities; and on the other hand it has practical implications for developing computing technologies to facilitate the development of the “knowledge-creating communities”. 1. Introduction In the last decades, the growing significance of knowledge to the social and economic development of our society has attracted tremendous efforts on “Knowledge Management” (e.g. Nonaka & Takeuchi 1995; Alavi & Leidner 2001). These efforts generally set the focus on studying the knowledge systems inside the boundary of a formal organization like a business company, a governmental department, and an academic institute. However, many knowledge activities and processes are beyond the institutional boundaries. One noteworthy phenomenon is that the online communities, which have been proliferated with the explosive development of the Internet and the Web, have become a prominent vehicle for knowledge creation, dissemination and utilization. The knowledge processes in these online communities are fundamentally different from those in a formal organization. The knowledge creation, dissemination and utilization in an online community are basically accomplished by independent contributors or participants in a self-organizing and “autopoietic” a fashion, while in the formal organization these knowledge processes usually take place under the centralized managerial control to achieve some well-defined organizational objectives. Therefore, the theories and models for organizational knowledge management cannot be simply transplanted to study the knowledge activities and processes in the online communities. * Work partially supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant No.70871016 a Autopoiesis is the process whereby an organization produces itself, as described in: Varela F.J. Maturana H.R. & Uribe, R. Biosystems 5:187–196, 1974 1