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Open-Source Trading Zones and Boundary Objects: Examining GitHub as a Space for Collaborating on “News”

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  • Mario Haim

    (Department of Media and Social Sciences, University of Stavanger, Norway)

  • Rodrigo Zamith

    (Journalism Department, University of Massachusetts Amherst, USA)

Abstract

New actors, actants, and activities have entered journalism’s spaces in recent years. While this has raised the potential for the disruption of existing social orders, such heterogeneous assemblages also provide fruitful grounds for substantive innovation within “trading zones.” This article explores one such potential zone, the code-sharing platform GitHub, delineating the primary actors oriented around the boundary object of “news,” the objectives of their projects, the nature of their collaborations, and their use of software licenses. The analysis examines attributes of 88,776 news-oriented project repositories, with a smaller subsample subjected to a manual content analysis. Findings show that this trading zone consisted primarily of journalistic outsiders; repositories focused on technological solutions to distributional challenges and efforts that made journalism more transparent; that there was limited direct trade via the use of collaborative affordances on the platform; and that only a minority of repositories employed a permissive license favored by open-source advocates. This leads to a broader conclusion that while GitHub may be discursively important within journalism and certainly provides an avenue for actors to enter journalism’s periphery, it offers a limited pathway for those peripheral actors to move closer to the center of journalism. That, in turn, impacts the platform’s—and its users’—ability to reconfigure if not spur a reimagining of journalism’s meanings, conventions, and allocations of different forms of capital.

Suggested Citation

  • Mario Haim & Rodrigo Zamith, 2019. "Open-Source Trading Zones and Boundary Objects: Examining GitHub as a Space for Collaborating on “News”," Media and Communication, Cogitatio Press, vol. 7(4), pages 80-91.
    • Handle: RePEc:cog:meanco:v:7:y:2019:i:4:p:80-91
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    3. Taneli Heikka & Elias G. Carayannis, 2019. "Three Stages of Innovation in Participatory Journalism—Co-initiating, Co-sensing, and Co-creating News in the Chicago School Cuts Case," Journal of the Knowledge Economy, Springer;Portland International Center for Management of Engineering and Technology (PICMET), vol. 10(2), pages 437-464, June.
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    Cited by:

    1. Valerie Belair-Gagnon & Avery E. Holton & Oscar Westlund, 2019. "Space for the Liminal," Media and Communication, Cogitatio Press, vol. 7(4), pages 1-7.

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