Globally distributed teams of volunteers and communication by electronic means are at the core of Open Source Software development. To help projects in managing their information, we defined a light-weight, role-based process improvement and observed its use in a longitudinal case study. Results gathered by mailing-list analysis give insights into the different types of information managed and their relative importance: While technical content such as how-tos and to-dos is most frequent, the amount of information regarding decision making is surprisingly low.

The public visibility of Free and Open Source Software development has sparked interest in the research communities of business, social and computer sciences to use the projects as research subjects. This article tries to open a discussion about the implications of this interest, whether the Free and Open Source communities appreciate being under “surveillance ” and how we can deal with the ethical problems related to the human subject research. 1