Power through brokering: open source community participation in software engineering student projects

Many software engineering projects use open source software tools or components. The project team's active participation in the open source community may be necessary for the team to use the technology. Based on an in-depth field study of industry software engineering project students interacting with an open source community, we find that participation in the community may affect the team's work and learning by strengthening the power of the broker between the team and the community. We outline pitfalls and benefits of having student teams acquire development-related knowledge from open source communities. The findings are relevant to the organization and supervision of software engineering student projects interacting with open source communities.