Abstract

Open collaborative development and transparent design processes are often associated to the concept of open design (OD). Studies in remote collaborative processes are still recent and a wide number of aspects of OD remain unclear. This study explores an OD project by mining data in collaboration platforms. As our research object, we selected the Open Agriculture Initiative. Data was mined from its online forum, and Github, a development platform. Social network analysis (SNA) and topic modeling techniques were used to explore four research questions. We comment on these questions highlighting differences between both platforms, stakeholder participation and personal interests, community changes over time, activity volume and latent topics. Finally, we conclude by indicating possible pathways to investigate OD as an emergent phenomenon by using data mining techniques.