Coordinating openness to diversity and contesting contributions in online communities

This paper studies the processes and mechanisms that enable online communities to coordinate and transform contesting contributions from multiple heterogeneous members with distinct visions and knowledge into productive outputs. Our research studies the OpenStreetMap communities of Belarus and Portugal, building on the analysis of 100 arguable cases at the community forums, chats, and mail lists; 30 in-depth interviews; and 16 hours of ethnographic observations of offline community meetings. The results reveal that online communities tend to self-organizes into groups with diverse ecosystem of IT tools and contribution mechanisms. Such groups engage in a conflicting interplay, which generates constructive processes within and between groups, enabling these to transform contesting contributions into a variety of productive outputs. Based on our findings, we develop a process model of transforming contesting contributions into productive outputs within online communities and discuss the implications of these findings for research on openness and online communities.