%0 Conference Paper %B OSS2008: Open Source Development, Communities and Quality (IFIP 2.13) %D 2008 %T Towards a Global Research Infrastructure for Multidisciplinary Study of Free/Open Source Software Development %A Gasser, Les %A Walt Scacchi %X The Free/Open Source Software (F/OSS) research community is growing across and within multiple disciplines. This community faces a new and unusual situation. The traditional difficulties of gathering enough empirical data have been replaced by issues of dealing with enormous amounts of freely available public data from many disparate sources (online discussion forums, source code directories, bug reports, OSS Web portals, etc.). Consequently, these data are being discovered, gathered, analyzed, and used to support multidisciplinary research. However at present, no means exist for assembling these data under common access points and frameworks for comparative, longitudinal, and collaborative research across disciplines. Gathering and maintaining large F/OSS data collections reliably and making them usable present several research challenges. For example, current projects usually rely on direct access to, and mining of raw data from groups that generate it, and both of these methods require unique effort for each new corpus, or even for updating existing corpora. In this paper, we identify several needs and critical factors in F/OSS empirical research across disciplines, and suggest recommendations for design of a global research infrastructure for multi-disciplinary research into F/OSS development. %B OSS2008: Open Source Development, Communities and Quality (IFIP 2.13) %S IFIP International Federation for Information Processing %I Springer %V 275/2008 %P 143 - 158 %8 2008/// %G eng %& 12 %R http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-09684-1_12 %> https://flosshub.org/sites/flosshub.org/files/Towards%20a%20Global%20Research%20Infrastracture.pdf %0 Book Section %B Open Source Development, Communities and Quality %D 2008 %T Towards a Global Research Infrastructure for Multidisciplinary Study of Free/Open Source Software Development %A Gasser, Les %A Walt Scacchi %E Russo, B. %E Damiani, E. %E Hissan, S. %E Lundell, B. %E Succi, G. %B Open Source Development, Communities and Quality %S IFIP International Federation for Information Processing %I Springer %C Boston %V 275 %P 143-158 %G eng %0 Conference Paper %B Proc. Intern. Workshop on Mining Software Repositories %D 2004 %T Research Infrastructure for Empirical Science of F/OSS %A Gasser, Les %A Gabriel Ripoche %A Sandusky, Robert J. %K data %K Data Collection %K empirical %K infrastructure %X F/OSS research faces a new and unusual situation: the traditional difficulties of gathering enough empirical data have been replaced by issues of dealing with enormous amounts of freely available data from many disparate sources (forums, code, bug reports, etc.) At present no means exist for assembling these data under common access points and frameworks for comparative, longitudinal, and collaborative research. Gathering and maintaining large F/OSS data collections reliably and making them usable present several research challenges. For example, current projects usually rely on “web scraping” or on direct access to raw data from groups that generate it, and both of these methods require unique effort for each new corpus, or even for updating existing corpora. In this paper we identify several common needs and critical factors in F/OSS empirical research, and suggest orientations and recommendations for the design of a shared research infrastructure. %B Proc. Intern. Workshop on Mining Software Repositories %P 12-16 %> https://flosshub.org/sites/flosshub.org/files/12ResearchInfrastructure.pdf %0 Report %D 2003 %T Continuous Design of Free/Open Source Software: Workshop Report and Research Agenda %A Gasser, Les %A Walt Scacchi %I UCI-UIUC Workshop on Continuous Design of Open Source Software %8 October 15 %G eng %0 Conference Paper %B Conference on Cooperation, Innovation & Technology (CITE 2003) %D 2003 %T Distributed Collective Practices and F/OSS Problem Management: Perspective and Methods %A Gasser, Les %A Gabriel Ripoche %K Automated process extraction %K bug fixing %K bug reports %K bugzilla %K Collective knowledge management %K Information extraction from natural language texts %K mozilla %K Software problem management %X This paper presents the state of our research on Distributed Collective Practices (DCPs) in Free/Open-Source Software (F/OSS) projects, focusing on sensemaking and resolution of software problems. We are exploring the hypothesis that variations in the content and in the articulation of these socio-technical processes have an impact on the outcome of the activity of F/OSS collectives, and more specifically on problem resolution. Our preliminary techniques for combining qualitative data analysis with automated process extraction result in a scalable analysis method called Computational Amplification (CA). We are applying CA to 128,000 problem reports from the Mozilla F/OSS project. The paper illustrates how CA is used to create multidimensional process models and shows types of conclusions we can reach. %B Conference on Cooperation, Innovation & Technology (CITE 2003)