Open Source - Community Building
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."