[Gllug] open source projects for PhD

Evangelia Berdou e.berdou at lse.ac.uk
Thu May 8 11:13:13 UTC 2003


Hello everybody,

I am a PhD student at the London School of Economics in the Media and
Communications department. I am contacting you because I thought that you
might have some good suggestions regarding the best way to investigate what
open source projects with a good quota of volunteers from the London area
are running this period. If you happen to know any yourself and/or would be
willing to bring me in contact with someone who does, it would be really
great. I am also keeping an eye on sites such as Freshmeat and Slashdot. The
reason is that I need to identify research opportunities for my PhD, which
will largely focus on the open source model of development. The title of my
project is:

"Free/Open Source -Community, Creativity, Participation & Evolving Patterns
of Work and Power: The intersection of online and offline worlds"

One part of the project will focus on issues of labour division and
hierarchy and I will be happy to provide any additional information upon
request, although I need to point out that my theoretical and methodological
framework is still under development. This is why my specifications are a
bit fuzzy at the moment. I am mostly interested in investigating:
a.	Two community- driven projects, one well under way and one at the
beginning of its development and
b.	one open source project in which one or more commercial actor(s) are
involved.
All projects should be under either a GPL or an open source license
conforming to the Open Source Definition. At the moment I don't have any
preference for any specific type of project (applications, tools, etc).

Provided that I obtain permission from the developers, the projects will be
treated as case studies. This would probably involve interviewing the
participants, observing users meetings and accessing the project's data
archived on the Internet.  All those interviewed will remain anonymous. I am
planning to start my research as soon as possible.

All comments and suggestions are welcome :0)

Thanks for your help.

Evangelia Berdou
PS My apologies to those of you who are going to receive this message
through the Lonix mailing list as well.

e.berdou at lse.ac.uk






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