Material crossroads in digital collaboration: how open source projects coordinate through digital artifacts

This paper examines how digital artifacts serve as material anchors enabling fluid organizations to coordinate across temporal and organizational boundaries. Building on Stjerne et al.'s (2022) concept of 'multitemporality', we argue that digital artifacts do more than facilitate communication—they actively bridge different temporal orientations while supporting cross-organizational collaboration. Through a multi-method case study of Istio, a major open-source service mesh project that transitioned from corporate stewardship (Google) to foundation governance (Cloud Native Computing Foundation), we analyze how digital artifacts simultaneously support immediate technical needs and longer-term strategic goals across organizational boundaries. Our preliminary findings reveal three key patterns: (1) governance artifacts serve distinct but complementary roles in maintaining project continuity while enabling organizational change; (2) technical coordination patterns shift significantly as projects move away from dominant contributor models; and (3) digital artifacts play a crucial role in bridging temporal horizons during transitions. These findings extend current understanding of how digital artifacts enable coordination in fluid organizations, particularly during periods of significant structural change. We contribute to temporality literature by showing how digital artifacts materially instantiate temporal connections, help resolve tensions between stability and flexibility, and maintain continuity during significant transitions.