Communication & Co-ordination activities are central to large software projects, but are difficult to observe and study in traditional (closed-source, commercial) settings because of the prevalence of informal, direct communication modes. OSS projects, on the other hand, use the internet as the communication medium, and typically conduct discussions in an open, public manner. As a result, the email archives of OSS projects provide a useful trace of the communication and co-ordination activities of the participants. However, there are various challenges that must be addressed before this data can be effectively mined. Once this is done, we can construct social networks of email correspondents, and begin to address some interesting questions. These include questions relating to participation in the email; the social status of different types of OSS participants; the relationship of email activity and commit activity (in the CVS repositories) and the relationship of social status with commit activity. In this paper, we begin with a discussion of our infrastructure and then discuss our approach to mining the email archives; and finally we present some preliminary results from our data analysis.

the state of the literature. We develop a framework for organizing the literature based on the input-mediatoroutput-input (IMOI) model from the small groups literature. We present a quantitative summary of articles selected for the review and then discuss findings of this literature categorized into issues pertaining to inputs (e.g., member characteristics, technology use and project characteristics), processes (software development and social processes), emergent states (e.g., trust and task related states) and outputs (e.g. team performance, FLOSS implementation and project evolution). Based on this review, we suggest topics for future research, as well as identifying methodological and theoretical issues for future inquiry in this area, including issues relating to sampling and the need for more longitudinal studies.

The fast growth of OSS has increased the interest in studying the composition of the OSS community and its collaboration mechanisms. Moreover, the success of a project may be related to the underlying social structure of the OSS development community. In this paper, we perform a quantitative analysis of Open Source Software developers by studying the entire development community at SourceForge [26]. Statistics and social network properties are explored to find collaborations and the effects of different members in the OSS development community. Small world phenomenon and scale free behaviors are found in the SourceForge development network. These topological properties may potentially explain the success and efficiency of OSS development practices. We also infer from our analysis that weakly associated but contributing co-developers and active users may be an important factor in OSS development. 1.

This paper discusses in detail a possible methodology for collecting repository data on a large number of open source software projects from a single project hosting and community site. The process of data retrieval is described along with the possible metrics that can be computed and which can be used for further analyses. Example research areas to be addressed with the available data and first results are given. Then, both advantages and disadvantages of the proposed methodology are discussed together with implications for future approaches. 1.

The emerging work on understanding open source software has strongly argued for the importance of understanding what leads to effectiveness in OSS development, has frequently pointed to ideology and communication as probable factors in effectiveness, and has presented conflicting opinions about the role of trust in effectiveness. For all the discussion of these issues, there has been no comprehensive elaboration of what constitutes OSS ideology, and very little empirical data has been brought to bear on examining antecedents of OSS team effectiveness. This paper develops a framework of the OSS ideology (including specific norms, beliefs, and values) and a theoretical model to show how components of the ideology, combined with trust and communication, impact effectiveness in OSS teams. The research model proposes distinct roles for affective trust, cognitive trust, social communication, and task communication as determinants of OSS team effectiveness. Qualitative and quantitative data are analyzed to evaluate the model. The results suggest that in order for OSS projects to grow into the kind of large successes that prior work has studied, the teams that work on them should foster the norms and values of the larger community and maintain consistent task communication to develop cognitive trust among members. Keywords: Open Source Software, Trust, Ideology, Communication, Virtual Teams ISRL categories: DA01, DA06, DD02 EFFECTIVENESS IN OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT TEAMS While the practices associated with Open Source Software (OSS) development have been in use for decades, recent years have seen a surge of interest in OSS across developers, businesses, governments, and academic researchers. Since its inception, more than 67,000 projects have been registered on Sourcefo...

Abstract – In this paper, the evolution of a large sample of open source software projects will be analysed. The evolution of commercial systems has been an issue that has long been a center of research, thus a coherent theoretical framework of software evolution has been developed and empirically tested. Therefore these results can be used to compare the situation in open source projects to the evolution of commercial projects. This allows to assess whether the underlying software process indeed significantly differs. The data collection methodology relying on a large software repository and the respective source code control systems is described, and an overview on the collected data on several thousand projects is given. The evolutionary behaviour is explored using both a linear and a quadratic model, with the quadratic model significantly outperforming the linear one. The most interesting fact is that while in the mean the growth rate is decreasing over time according to the laws of software evolution, especially larger projects with a higher number of participants might be more often able to sustain super-linear growth. I.

Building on transaction cost economics, this work describes the four different forms of communities and introduces transaction benefits as a means of explaining their existence. A research project to investigate governance, leadership, and management in two of the four forms of communities, adaptive and inventive, is described. It is argued that these digital communities are a way of engaging graduate students in wealth creation and thus ‘waste ’ in graduate education can be reduced. 1

The OSS community can be considered as a complex, self-organizing system. These systems are typically comprised of large numbers of locally interacting elements. Developers are main components in this network. The interaction between developers forms a collaborative social network. Study of the roles of developers and their activities can help us determine the development of projects. In this paper, we perform a quantitative analysis of Open Source Software developers by studying the whole developer community at SourceForge. Our research provides topological and evolutionary statistics for the OSS developer social network, which is helpful to understand the OSS phenomenon. Our work shows that OSS developer network is a scale free network. Contact:

Abstract – The FASD study gathered 1330 answers about fun and software development from open source developers as well as 114 answers from programmers working in commercial software projects. The analysis of these data proves that fun plays an important role when software developers decide to get engaged in an open source project. Moreover, the comparison of the answers gives evidence for the hypothesis that programming in an open source project is significantly more fun compared to the same activity under commercial conditions. The reasons for this fact are that open source projects are able to attract software developers with a credible project vision and that they can offer them an optimal challenge. I.

Keywords, and a list of Authors, each of which is a Person. The schedule specifies the location of ontologies, whose concepts are used in the annotation tags. When you point your agent, similar to the Retsina Calendar Agent [16] to the URL of the schedule, it first downloads the ontologies referred to by the schedule. The agent then parses the schedule with respect to these ontologies and displays a list of talks with a summary of each talk and links to the venue and the authors of the corresponding papers.