From Open Science to Open Source (and beyond): A Historical Perspective on Open Practices without and with IT

Abstract

Openness as organizational philosophy and theoretical concept has continuously gained importance over the past decades. While the adoption of open practices such as open-source development or crowdsourcing is primarily academically observed in the 20th and 21st century, organizational practices adopting or facilitating openness have already been applied before there was an understanding what openness actually depicts. For centuries, public and private stakeholders utilized a broad variety of open practices such as open science, industrial exhibitions, solution sourcing or industrial democracy in order to achieve certain anticipated effects – fully in the absence of IT. Due to the missing historical understanding, this paper provides a first holistic historical perspective on the emergence of open practices, considering the context of the political, technological and societal developments. Utilizing a structured literature review, the paper puts a special focus on the historical narrative and the connection between openness without and with IT. The paper concludes that open practices are not a recent phenomenon, but were already applied successfully by affected stakeholders in previous centuries, whereas applied open practices partly build upon each other and show resembling patterns. Historically, two central shifts are identified: (1) a shift from government-driven towards organization- and community-driven open practices, and (2) a shift from mainly transparency-oriented open practices towards a stronger utilization of inclusion.