Participation in online interaction spaces: Design-use mediation in an Open Source Software community

This research aims at characterizing emerging roles fostering design-use mediation during the Open Source Software (OSS) design process through the analysis of participation. Studying OSS is of particular interest: (1) to investigate socio-technical settings supporting user participation to the design process, which is considered to be the major strength of OSS design; (2) to gain insights into supporting the changing nature of the software industry, which is becoming more and more distributed and global, and which is thus increasingly making use of OSS design tools and methods. In this research, we characterized effective roles of participants, i.e. participation, on the basis of activities analysis in three online interaction spaces (discussion, documentation and implementation) during a continuous “pushed-by-users” design process of the Python project. Participation is targeted through a methodology articulating: (1) structural analyses (organization of the discussions, regularity and involvement of participants, quotes-based social network) in usage-oriented and development-oriented mailing lists of the projects’ discussion space; (2) actions to the code and documentation made by participants in the implementation and documentation spaces. Besides the importance of the users’ contribution to the process, OSS design is fostered by some key-participants, the cross-participants, who act as boundary spanners between the developers and the users, helping them to go beyond some barriers to participation. These findings can be reinforced developing software to automate the structural analysis of discussions and actions to the code and documentation.