Discursive Modulation in Open Source Software: How Online Communities Shape Novelty and Complexity

We study the development of two open source software (OSS) web frameworks to understand how OSS communities shape software novelty and complexity in the absence of strong organizational hierarchies. We examine how projects engage in distinct “discursive modulation practices” to imprint the community’s shared core doctrines and design principles onto the software thereby shaping its novelty and complexity. We borrow the concept of modulation from audio synthesis to explain how a pre-existing signal—in our case, the ongoing community discourse—gets modulated to produce varying sounds—in our case the novelty and complexity of the software. The concept of modulation offers a lens to understand how emergent, community-wide development activities are influenced by filtering of discursive positions and mixing of those positions, thereby shaping the artifact’s novelty and complexity. Our research shows that the modulation of novelty exhibits a range from “proximal” to “distal” searches for new features, while the modulation of complexity varies between “integration” and “deprecation.” By drawing on these concepts, we formulate a theory that explains how modulation results in alternative OSS community approaches to shaping software novelty and complexity, and how this process reflects, and is reflected in, the resulting software artifact.