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The global economy's digital infrastructure is based on free and open source software. To analyse how firms indirectly collaborate via employee contributions to developer-run projects, we propose a formal definition of 'industrial public goods' – inter-firm cooperation, volunteer and paid labour overlap, and participation inequality. We verify its empirical robustness by collecting networks of commits made by firm employees to active GitHub software repositories. Despite paid workers making more contributions, volunteers play a significant role. We find which firms contribute most, which projects benefit from firm investments, and identify distinct 'contribution territories' since the two central firms never co-contribute to top-20 repositories. We highlight the challenge posed by 'Big Tech' to the non-rival status of industrial public goods, thanks to cloud-based systems which resist sharing, and suggest there may be 'contribution deserts' neglected by large information technology firms, despite their importance for the open source ecosystem's sustainability and diversity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The spread of COVID-19 misinformation on social media has elicited concern amongst scholars, health agencies and governments owing to its potential harms to public health. This article addresses the question of how networks of Australian health professionals engaged with COVID-19 facts and myths on Twitter between August and October 2020. After reviewing selected literature on COVID-19 misinformation, we present our analytical choices and the methodology we used to constitute datasets of COVID-19 factual and mythical hashtags and of verified Australian health professional accounts (N:377). The article distinguishes between the capacities of 'actor-actants' and 'issue-actants,' and between the adoption of 'field' and 'contested' hashtags during a controversy. We identify categories of Australian health professional Twitter accounts such as GPs, nurses, specialists, public health professionals and researchers, and analyse the patterns of connections between these actor-actants and COVID-19 facts and myths. We find that these categories exhibit clearly distinct behaviour when tweeting or retweeting factual and mythical hashtags. Even though the rate of Australian health professionals' connection with myths in comparison to facts on Twitter is low, hashtags such as #hydroxychloroquine attracted significant engagement. We examine these hashtags' context and find that they were mainly being debunked, though a minority of accounts endorsed them. We analyse these adoption patterns, and critically assess the 'echo chamber effect.' We also consider public health and privacy implications for the dissemination of accurate information, for trust in health professionals during a pandemic, and for combatting misinformation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Information technology (IT) firms are paying developers in Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) projects, leading to the emergence of hybrid forms of work. In order to understand how the firm–project hybridisation process occurs, we present the results of an online survey of participants in the Debian project, as well as interviews with Debian Developers. We find that the intermingling of the commercial logic of the firm and the communal logic of the project requires rhetorical legitimation. We analyse the discourses used to legitimise firm–project cooperation as well as the organisational mechanisms which facilitate this cooperation. A first phase of legitimation, based on firm adoption of open licenses and developer self-fulfilment, aims to erase the commercial/communal divide. A second more recent phase seeks to professionalise work relations inside the project and, in doing so, challenges the social order which restricts participation in FOSS. Ultimately, hybridisation raises the question of the fair distribution of the profits firms derive from FOSS. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article extends the field conceptualisation of social change and innovation adoption, which hinges upon the strategic capacities of actors, to the online environment. We focus on a key aspect of social movement organisations (SMOs), competition for members, resources and attention over an environmental risk issue. The incorporation of network theory enables us to map how the structural position of actors in the field is associated with their actions – for example, their response to an exogenous shock such as a new threat to the environment. We analyse how actors in the online environmental movement respond to the emergence of nanoscience and technology (NST) as a risk issue, and test the field theory hypothesis that dominated actors are more likely to adopt this issue in the early stages of emergence. Our findings challenge field theory orthodoxy and suggest that whilst challengers innovate, dominants co-opt by adopting the issue in a second stage. Finally, we examine why the notion that NST entails significant environmental and health risks was not propelled into wider public consciousness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We critically engage with the actor-network theory precept that human and nonhuman actants have symmetrical capacities. In contrast, we distinguish actor-actants, who have the capacity to care about other actants, from issue-actants, who do not. We explore the gathering of participants leading to the emergence of matters of concern by mapping how Australian and Canadian bee-related websites connect to the issue of bee extinction ("colony collapse"). A "symmetrical" hypothesis was that major differences in local geographies and exposure to parasites would result in different rates of connection. This hypothesis was confirmed: All influential Canadian actor-actants connected to "colony collapse," whereas no influential Australian actor-actants did. Our findings also suggest an "asymmetrical" interpretation: Influential Australian actor-actants were aware of the catastrophic disappearance of bees, but did not care. Denying that some actants have agency over others means that it is impossible to form a moral opinion about connections or about the rights of dominated actor-actants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the patterns of news engagement among news consumers with different political affiliation and cultural background. We use computational methods and data from Twitter in a cross-country comparison of engagement with six online news sources in Australia and South Korea. For our analysis, we used a subset of Twitter users who retweeted at least one political story during the period of collection, and for whom we were able to predict political affiliation using correspondence analysis and data on Twitter follower ties to politicians. We find that right-wing Australian retweeters are more intense in their news engagement, compared with their left-wing counterparts, whereas in South Korea it was the opposite. Australian right-wing political retweeters have more diverse information sources, while there was no difference in information diversity between the right and left in South Korea. We discuss how the political situation in South Korea at the time of data collection may have affected our analysis. We emphasise the methodological contributions of our research and its connection to on-going research into the behavioural foundations of 'filter bubbles'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]