%0 Conference Proceedings %B Proceedings of the International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS) %D 2008 %T Depicting What Really Matters: Using Episodes to Study Latent Phenomenon %A Annabi, Hala %A Kevin Crowston %A Heckman, Robert %K Learning %K Process %X Research on processes and practices around information systems is often best conducted in naturalistic setting. To conduct valid and reliable research in such settings, researchers must find ways to reliably bound the phenomenon in which they are interested. In this paper we propose that researchers use episodes—events or processes occurring over a specified period of time—to isolate that which interests them from the vast set of related human behavior. The paper discusses the nature of episodes in the literature and suggests particular research settings in which episodes can be useful. The paper describes a three stage methodology to identify episodes for systematic data collection and analysis. The paper presents an example study using episodes to study group learning process in distributed groups. %B Proceedings of the International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS) %> https://crowston.syr.edu/sites/crowston.syr.edu/files/Depicting%20What%20Really%20Matters%20Using%20Episodes%20to%20Study%20Latent%20Phe.pdf %0 Conference Proceedings %B Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS) %D 2003 %T Defining Open Source Software project success %A Kevin Crowston %A Annabi, Hala %A James Howison %K FLOSS %X Information systems success is one of the most widely used dependent variables in information systems research. In this paper, we identify a range of measures that can be used to assess the success of Open Source Software (OSS) projects. We identify measures based on a review of the literature, a consideration of the OSS development process and an analysis of the opinions of OSS developers. For each measure, we provide examples of how they might be used in a study of OSS development. %B Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS) %C Seattle, WA, December %G eng %> https://crowston.syr.edu/sites/crowston.syr.edu/files/icis2003success.pdf