Open Source - Community Building
Research Papers
Open Source Community Building
Thesis by Matthias Stuermer
URL = http://opensource.mit.edu/papers/sturmer.pdf
"Building an active and helpful community around an open source project is a complex task for its leaders. Therefore investigations in this work are intended to define the optimum starting position of an open source project and to identify recommendable promoting actions by project leaders to enlarge community size in a healthy way. For this paper eight interviews with committed representatives of successful open source projects have led to over 12 hours of conversation about community building. Analysing the statements of these experienced community members exposed helpful activities that led to the presently prospering communities of their projects. Summarizing the conclusions of this qualitative research a table with conditions for successful open source project initialisation and a subject-level promotion matrix of community building could be created. They include suggestions on how to start a new open source project and how to improve and increase the community of an already advanced open source project."
Managing Volunteer Activity in Free Software Projects
Research paper by Martin Michlmayr:
URL = http://opensource.mit.edu/papers/michlmayr-mia.pdf
"This paper shows Debian's approach to inactive volunteers. Insights presented here can be applied to other free software projects in order to implement effective quality assurance strategies."
The social structure of Free and Open Source software development
Research paper by Crowston, Kevin & James Howison:
URL = http://opensource.mit.edu/papers/crowstonhowison.pdf
"we examined 120 project teams from SourceForge, representing a wide range of FLOSS project types, for their communications centralization as revealed in the interactions in the bug tracking system. We found that FLOSS development teams vary widely in their communications centralization, from projects completely centered on one developer to projects that are highly decentralized and exhibit a distributed pattern of conversation between developers and active users."
Community structure of modules in the Apache project
Gonzalez-Barahona, Jesus M. , Luis Lopez and Gregorio Robles:
URL = http://opensource.mit.edu/papers/barahona-apache_structure.pdf
"he relationships among modules in a software project of a certain size can give us much information about its internal organization and a way to control and monitor development activities and evolution of large libre software projects. In this paper, we show how information available in CVS repositories can be used to study the structure of the modules in a project when they are related by the people working in them, and how techniques taken from the social networks fields can be used to highlight the characteristics of that structure. As a case example, we also show some results of applying this methodology to the Apache project in several points in time. Among other facts, it is shown how the project evolves and is self-structuring, with developer communities of modules corresponding to semantically related families of modules."
Mobilization of Software Developers: The Free Software Movement
Elliott, Margret & Walter Scacchi:
URL = http://opensource.mit.edu/papers/elliottscacchi2.pdf
"We present results from an empirical study of a F/OSS development community, GNUenterprise (GNUe) whose purpose is to build an Enterprise Resource Planning system. We show how the beliefs in freedom and freedom of choice, and the values of cooperative work and community building are manifested in the GNUe norms of informal self-management, immediate acceptance of fellow contributors, and open disclosure."
How free software developers work. The mobilization of “distant communities”
Demazière D., Horn F., Jullien N.:
URL = http://opensource.mit.edu/papers/CLES_DDFHNJ_juin_2006__vm_Anglais.pdf
"We propose to analyze this work starting with the paradoxical notion of a “distant community”, that aims to illustrate the tension between, on the one hand, the strength of the sense of belonging to a specific world identifiable in the discourse of the participants and, on the other hand, the distances that separate the contributors in terms of relationships, status, and background. In doing this the aim is to produce a description, necessarily plural, of the different forms of “distant communities” that enables the production of goods in unique social and organizational conditions."