Telecommuting, virtual teams, & remote management resources

Going Open: Does it Mean Giving Away Control?. By Nadia Noori and Michael Weiss. Technology Innovation Management Review. January 2013. All successful open source platforms evolved from voluntarily initiatives to sustainable entities. "Within the sample cases, we found three types of governance models: tight-control, loose-control, and hybrid-control. Each governance model consists of the following attributes: community structure, extension types, and governance structure and network openness. Each model was associated with non-trivial trade-offs in terms of governance, openness, quality, and flow of ideas." Also "Throughout the years, the open source community has learned how to organize itself and provide collaboration models and tools that fit within the free/libre open source software context. These communities needed such control mechanisms in place to ensure quality and maintain growth."

How Open Source Software Works: "Free" User-to-User Assistance?. By Eric von Hippel, Karim Lakhani, MIT, Sloan School of Management, Sloan Working Paper 4117-00, eBusiness@MIT Working Paper 132, May 2000

"What makes a virtual organization work?" Markus, L., B. Manvile and C. Agres (2000). MIT Sloan Management. "What motivates people to participate in open-source projects? And how is participation governed in the absence of employment or fee-for-service contracts? The answers to those questions reveal some important lessons for organizations — whether or not they develop software products — about both the challenges of keeping and motivating knowledge workers and the process of managing various types of virtual organizations, such as ad hoc project teams, virtual teams, communities of practice and multicompany collaborations." To access, search the title and authors on the search engine of your choice.

"The Psychology of Effective Business Communications in Geographically Dispersed Teams"
In September 2006, Cisco released this white paper that identifies rules for communicating that will help virtual teams to work together successfully. Virtual communication 'best practices' recommended in the report include agreeing to protocols on response times, and establishing rules for the selection of media and the frequency of communications, especially in multi-cultural teams. Encouraging socializing and ad-hoc chats over a virtual 'coffee machine' by using spontaneous and richer media for communications can also speed up the development of trust. Whether you work with online volunteers or with paid staff in dispersed locations, this is a very interesting and helpful white paper. One of the things I like about it in particular is it's focus on the cultural differences that can become exaggerated within virtual teams and lead to misunderstandings. Great stuff. Read the press release about this (it's a good list of highlights of the white paper). You can download the Executive Summary (PDF 137.10KB).

Understanding the Motivations, Participation and Performance of Open Source Software Developers: A Longitudinal Study of the Apache Projects. Jeff Roberts, Il-Horn Hann,Sandra Slaughter. September 1, 2004. "Understanding what motivates individuals to participate is a central theme in the research on open source software development. Our study contributes to this research by revealing how the different motivations of open source developers are interrelated, how these motivations influence their participation and performance, and how past performance influences their subsequent motivations." Contact sandras@andrew.cmu.edu, Tepper School of Business Carnegie Mellon University, for this paper.

"Communication and Trust in Global Virtual Teams"
This is an in-depth academic study from 1998 by Dr. Sirkka L. Jarvenpaa that "explores the challenges of creating and maintaining trust in a global virtual team," particularly those that involve people of different cultures and interest, and varying degrees of commitment. I think it's still relevant 10 years after its original publication.

"Successful Management in the Virtual Office"
This is a masters thesis by Bernie Kelley and Bruce McGraw that was published in 1996, and it had more influence on the development of the resources at the than anything other single resource.

"Building an Internet Culture"
"In thinking about culturally appropriate ways of using technologies like the Internet, the best starting-point is with people -- coherent communities of people and the ways they think together. " An excellent essay by Phil Agree that discusses the importance of social networking to job development and performance, how the Internet provides a great opportunity for such networking, and how cyberspace needs to be promoted as a place for social interaction and prevented from becoming a corporate wasteland. Many real world examples of such social networking that have assisted companies and individuals are given, even ways in which developing countries can use the internet to the advantage of itself and its people. This paper is from 1998 -- and still offers great insight.

Telework.gov
The USA government's Office of Personnel Management and the General Services Administration (GSA) established this interagency website to provide easy access to information about telework in the Federal Government. The information contained on this website pertains only to Executive Branch agencies and employees, but its extensive information about policies and procedures, tools and resources and reports and studies provide excellent guidance for any organization.