Practices in the design of open source products by online communities

The Open source software phenomenon is already well described in literature, but its evolution towards other fields such as tangible hardware product development, remains mostly theoretical. Existing literature has identified that to push the open source product development (OSPD) practice further process support is needed to support the organizational challenges of such projects in the achievement of high quality complex products. The functionalities of this process support have not been characterized yet. The objective of this article is to fill this gap by exploring the practices emerging from OSPD communities to observe current usages in order to collaborate incrementally in the future. To this end, Fjeldsted’s framework were activated during a qualitative and comparative empirical study performed with 28 participants of OSPD projects through semi-directed interviews. The preliminary results indicate 3 main needs of these communities in the potential use of the platform which should serve to characterize OSPD projects. They also reveal the importance of the attitude of original founders, namely the capacity for openness and mutual learning, motivation for “hedonism”, social entrepreneurship.