Massiel is, at this point, a small study hosted by Google Code of whether some open source projects depend on a fixed subset of people, or whether they are sustainable and new generations of community members can take over. And we are doing it a la open research.
Massiel was born as part of a short collaboration between OSS Watch (UK) and Libresoft (Spain), and informed by our Profiling Communities Expert Workshop. In short, Massiel is so far an attempt to extend FLOSSMetrics, providing scripts for higher level analysis of databases created from projects’ svn logs and mailing lists (we have imported some code from CVSAnalY to do this). We are also exploring with Andrea Wiggins the use of workflows like those in myExperiment.
So why bother? Because even though OSS Watch is not a research group, data to back our advice to projects and institutions is very useful. This is important, for example, to avoid confirmation bias. That is, to avoid cherry picking information that confirms what we think about software projects and communities, while snubbing facts that contradict our beliefs.
The Profiling Communities workshop that we ran on July 11 addressed interesting questions. How can research be useful to evaluate open software communities? What is available in terms of data, tools, scientific methodology and algorithms? What would be interesting to measure?
The bit about open research just means that instead of running the study behind closed doors, and then one day publishing the results in a subscription journal, we make the data, methodology and intermediate results available right from the beginning.
This is more convenient for dissemination, but also a more effective collaboration framework for this project. The collaboration started when Israel Herraiz from Libresoft came to OSS Watch for a 1 month internship. In this case, starting a Google Code project was an easy way of setting up the infrastructure for the project (version control for the code, an issue tracker, mailing lists…), allowing it to survive past the 1 month internship, and at the same time enabling contributions from other people.
In addition to the purely utilitarian side of it, it could be argued that open research is better value for society than the more widespread subscription journal alternative. Scott Aaronson’s “Review of The Access Principle by John Willinsky” notes (with a good sense of humour) that researches and their institutions are using their time and resources to produce a wealth of invaluable scientific knowledge, that they give away to private publishing conglomerates. And this knowledge, produced by the scientific community and often funded with public money, remains closed and expensive, not only to the general public, but to the scientific community itself.
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