Last month, OSS Watch delivered a series of sessions on communication and participation with open source communities at the TYPO3 Developer Days event in Eindoven. One of the sessions in our series looked at the theory of communities, the varieties of the communities we form and the motivations involved in each. The core message of … Read more
OSS Watch’s legal officer Rowan Wilson was fortunate enough to see Joel Spolsky of StackExchange speak at Open World Forum about the Cultural Anthropology of StackOverflow. I wasn’t able to attend, but there’s an longer version of the talk available on YouTube. Joel presents some interesting points about how the design of a piece of … Read more
In November, Mark and I will be in Mannheim, Germany as part of the TYPO3 Marketing Sprint Week, where we’ll be facilitating an OSS Watch workshop focussed on communications in open source communities. Effective communication in all its aspects is crucial for a healthy open source community, and we’re excited to be able to pull … Read more
We’ve written several times recently about the UK Cabinet Office’s Open Source Procurement Toolkit, and the Open Source Options document that forms part of it. The original document lists open source alternatives for common proprietary solutions that might be used in government and public sector organisations. The types of software solutions listed are mostly generic … Read more
Agencies run funding programmes with an expectation that many will not lead to sustainable innovations in the longer term. But is the structure of funded projects itself causing projects to fail? Dr Cathy Gunn and Rhiannon Herrick have been investigating this issue, looking at 22 projects in Australasian higher education from the past five years, … Read more
When discussing the tools used by open source communities, a conversation inevitably arises about mailing lists and forums. The received wisdom suggests that the more technical members of the community (often, the developers) prefer mailing lists, while the less technical members (often, the users) prefer forums. I see this distinction as much like the distinction … Read more