Individuals’ Use of E-Mail Communication Genres in Open Source Software Community Building

The advent of the participative Internet (Web 2.0) sheds a new light on traditional knowledge about communication practices. The role of information and communication technologies seems to be very central in managerial literature, while the human side of the issue is less considered. This paper argues that individuals establish communication genres as semantic templates for accomplishing their communicative projects. Communication genres are codes of default behavioral expectations resulting from recurrent communication actions over the time. By using semantic network analytical techniques, our argument is explored in a particular empirical setting, that is, a virtual community of open source software development.