Toward understanding new feature request systems as participation architectures for supporting open innovation

Most research regarding innovation in open source software
communities pertains to identifying supporting conditions for
promoting code contribution as a way to innovate the software.
Instead, this paper seeks to identify social and technological
affordances of new feature request systems and their potential to
support open innovation through integration of peripheral
community members’ ideas for advancing the software. Initial
findings from the first of a planned study of multiple open source
software communities are presented to identify attributes of
effective participation architectures.