Don't Ask, Do Tell: Knowledge Work and Public Secrecy in Online Innovation Communities

The present study is based on a netnography of the development of “HackerToy”, an ready-to-use physical hacking device, which can be purchased and used by lay-people to reveal and tinker with the hidden wireless signals that penetrate the world all around us.

We find that this open source development process is based on the public secret of the potentially illegal affordances of the device , which organises the crowds activities. It protects the crowds development processes from regulatory constraints and interference, while at the same time attracting new developers as members of the crowd thereby pushing innovation boundaries. More specifically we discuss how public secrecy contributes to crowd cohesion and ambiguity, both of which enables and maintains the ongoing development. We do so by engaging with debates on the performative effects on secrecy, which moves beyond an understanding of secrecy as value protection or hiding misconduct, but reconsiders the intricate and productive relationship between publicity and secrecy. This also challenges the functionalist premise of secrecy deployed in the open innovation literature.