Bushouse, Brenda

During the COVID pandemic, spontaneous collective action emerged through voluntary efforts In this study, we document the collective action by New York City nonprofit arts and culture organizations that built social capital where none existed. In NYC, the elite institutions (e.g., Carnegie Hall, The Metropolitan Opera) had a network before the pandemic; however, this was not the case for other parts of the sector. Each of NYC’s five boroughs had networks through their local arts councils. However, there were few or no network ties between smaller and elite nonprofits, across disciplines or boroughs beyond the cultural corridor of Manhattan and East Brooklyn. The elite organizations’ strong network led them to meet daily to collaboratively respond to the pandemic closures. At the suggestion of the NYC Department of Cultural Affairs, they opened the call to all nonprofit NYC arts and culture organizations. The Culture@3 virtual space was a daily call at 3 pm during the pandemic shutdown, where nonprofit arts and culture leaders came to share information and, in the process, establish common understanding across disciplines, boroughs, and organizational sizes. We title our study “The Power to Unmute” because the Zoom microphone and gallery view of participants equalized access regardless of organizational size, discipline, or borough. We held 16 interviews with nonprofit arts and culture leaders, government officials, and foundations who participated in the calls. One of our team collaborators participated in the Zoom calls on behalf of a nonprofit theater. Through the interviews and lived experience, our study identifies the rules, norms, and strategies that emerged during the pandemic shutdown that helped arts and culture organizations survive and ultimately wove a new arts and culture network fabric.

This paper explores the extent to which outcomes from action situations at multiple levels drive institutional change in open-source software (OSS) production, using the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) as a case study. Drawing on the Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD), we develop a novel methodological approach based on Ostrom’s rule-type classification and the Institutional Grammar (IG) to capture institutional change from a micro-level perspective.

We created a longitudinal dataset comprising ASF’s policy documents to identify instances of formal institutional change (i.e., a policy document change). We compare formal changes to discussions and communications by the ASF board (constitutional level) to assess their role in policy change. We also analyze incubation project emails (operational level) to assess OSS production practices. This allows us to identify divergence between rules and rules-in-use. We utilize Ostrom’s rule types (1990) to categorize policy document changes into rules types.. Then, we employ Cosine and Jaccard similarity metrics to quantify changes between document versions. We track shifts in institutional arrangements over time to identify variations in the number and type of institutional statements.

This study contributes to the commons theory by advancing our understanding of institutional change. These insights have important implications for designing institutional arrangements for OSS sustainability. Beyond OSS, the methodological innovations have widespread applicability for using text analysis to study institutional evolution.