Flexible Technologies, Inflexible Routines?

Last week, I was invited to give a guest lecture at the WTMC graduate school, a Dutch programme for PhDs in science and technology studies that I'm familiar with from my own PhD days. The upcoming spring workshop is focused on "Routines and Disruptions," and one of the organisers asked if I could contribute. The workshop, bringing together a diverse group of PhD students and lecturers from the Netherlands and internationally, is held at Soeterbeeck, a former monastery in the countryside that’s now home to a few donkeys and llamas. Naturally, I said yes.

The theme of "Routines and Disruptions" resonates with my current work on open source adoption in the public sector: the shift towards open source technologies is an example of how routines can be disrupted. European governments are increasingly trying to reduce their dependence on individual IT providers, mostly based in the US, and are encouraging government agencies to adopt open source technologies, which can reduce their dependence on specific companies but also disrupt established work routines. There are multiple disruptions happening here: the shift to a multipolar world is challenging established diplomatic relationships and increasing the risk of an overreliance on foreign IT solutions, while the adoption of open source alternatives is disrupting procurement and daily work routines in the public sector.

Flexible routines meeting flexible technologies

At Soeterbeeck, I want to explore these different levels of disruption and discuss how government agencies can establish new routines using open source software. This, I think, is a major factor in open source adoption – we can provide open source alternatives but routines are usually slow to change. Paul M. Leonardi, a former professor at the University of California, wrote a paper in 2011 called "When Flexible Routines Meet Flexible Technologies: Affordance, Constraint, and the Imbrication of Human and Material Agencies." In it, he argues that flexible technologies – like open source software, I would argue – allow people to adapt them to their routines. But when do people change their routines, and when do they change their technologies? According to Leonardi, it depends on whether the technology seems to be constraining or enabling:

The case of a computer simulation technology for automotive design used to illustrate this framework suggests that perceptions of constraint lead people to change their technologies while perceptions of affordance lead people to change their routines. This imbrication metaphor is used to suggest how a human agency approach to technology can usefully incorporate notions of material agency into its explanations of organizational change.

Applying this insight to open source adoption suggests that if we want people to change their routines – and adopting open source software requires significant changes, from procurement processes to getting used to a new user experience – it helps if the software offers new possibilities that make the change worthwhile. This could be new features, opportunities for collaboration, or even status gains if open source software were the socially preferred option. A study by Maha Shaikh, Associate Professor of Digital Innovation at the ESADE Business School in Barcelona, supports this finding, highlighting the importance of promoters who consider the change worthwhile:

To be able to negotiate a change in software use at such a broad level is rarely successful if attempted all at once. It needs to be staged and phased in with the keenest adopters being drawn in first to create momentum and goodwill for the change. The idea behind favoring primary adoption before any level of secondary adoption is that your IT personnel are more likely to be agnostic to the license of a tool to be adopted and rather they focus on its pragmatic usability. There will be a need for your IT staff to become the trainers of your secondary adopters so clearly this is a prerequisite in the process of adoption.

Both studies suggest that establishing new routines around new technologies requires people to see benefits in them – benefits that primary adopters are more likely to recognise. I'm looking forward to discussing this further with a group of bright PhD students at Soeterbeeck in May, who are primary adopters in every sense of the word.

The Toybox

I'm particularly excited about this edition's toybox, as it's based on a presentation my colleagues gave just last week at FOSDEM, together with our French partners at DINUM. We're jointly working on open source office suites, openDesk and La Suite numérique, and one result of this collaboration is Docs, a collaborative note-taking application available on GitHub, complete with a test account to try it out.

If you have an open source project you'd like to share, please don't hesitate to reach out to me at theartofherdingcats [at] proton.me, and I'll be happy to feature it in a future issue 👇

Treats

I attended not only FOSDEM but several events during the EU OS Week, which was a treat in itself. At the EU OS Policy Summit, the UN, together with several partner organisations, presented a report on the 2024 OSPOs for Good Conference and announced a whole UN OS Week for June 2025. I also had the pleasure of moderating a round table discussion at FOSDEM with several OS vendors, including Ludovic Dubost, founder of XWiki, who was recently featured on Emily Omier's podcast – listen in to learn more about the pros and cons of bootstrapping an OS company.

Take care,

Lea