%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)