stuermer.ch - Licenciate of Matthias

Licenciate of Matthias

This page includes information about my licenciate I wrote until March 2005 at the University of Bern, Switzerland about "Open Source Community Building."

Abstract

Building an active and helpful community around an open source project is a complex task for its leaders. Therefore investigations in this work are intended to define the optimum starting position of an open source project and to identify recommendable promoting actions by project leaders to enlarge community size in a healthy way. For this paper eight interviews with committed representatives of successful open source projects have led to over 12 hours of conversation about community building. Analysing the statements of these experienced community members exposed helpful activities that led to the presently prospering communities of their projects. Summarizing the conclusions of this qualitative research a table with conditions for successful open source project initialisation and a subject-level promotion matrix of community building could be created. They include suggestions on how to start a new open source project and how to improve and increase the community of an already advanced open source project.

Investigated Open Source Projects

Plone (Bernhard Bühlmann)
Magnolia (Boris Kraft)
Cocoon (Bertrand Delacrétaz)
Kupu (Guido Wesdorp)
Lenya (Michael Wechner)
TYPO3 (Daniel Hinderink)
eZ publish (Bård Farstad)
Xaraya (Gregor Rothfuss)

Downloads

The final version (2005-03-02) of the licenciate including the complete interview transcripts as appendix

OpenSourceCommunityBuilding_MStuermer.pdf (1142.9 kB)

The licenciate in the great OpenOffice.org format - Small is beautiful!

OpenSourceCommunityBuilding_MStuermer.sxw (272.2 kB)

The current version (2005-01-20) of the spanning aspect/perspective matrix which will be one part of the conclusions of the paper

unibe_lizenziat_aspectmatrix_v1.pdf (57.2 kB)

On December 8, in the middle of the six months during writing the thesis, I had to present the current state of the work. Unfortunately again only in german ;)

unibe_lizenziat_zwischenpraesentation.pdf (403.4 kB)

The research concept of the master thesis. It describes the research questions to be answered in this paper and also the questions that are out of scope.

unibe_lizenziat_researchconcept_v1.1.pdf (46.2 kB)

The proposal of the master thesis, unfortunately still in german (I decided afterwards to write the paper in english). Lots of the contents have changed since the submission...

unibe_lizenziat_proposal_v1.4.pdf (73.1 kB)

Vida - a PHP5 MVC web application framework www.vidaframework.org

The code is written by Emanuel Indermühle, foresite Systems, and I'm somewhat doing all the rest, including using it for customer software, so far.

LOTS - Let's Open the Source www.lots.ch

This is an exhibition about open source software where developers, business people and users of open source software meet physically. LOTS aims to support the personal and direct contact between those groups leading to better communication. This year's event takes place from 17 to 19 February, 2005 at the University of Bern. I'm working in the organisational committee as Communication Coordinator.

CiteSeer citeseer.ist.psu.edu

Lots of papers about open source research are published here, also the one from Gregor J. Rothfuss "A Framework for Open Source".

MIT Open Source opensource.mit.edu

The Free/Open Source Research Community of MIT, in cooperation with University of St. Gallen.

Seven Do’s and Don’ts for OSP Leaders (p. 112)