Title
Cross-participants: fostering design-use mediation in an open source software community
Abstract
Motivation -- This research aims at investigating emerging roles and forms of participation fostering design-use mediation during the Open Source Software design process Research approach -- We compare online interactions for a successful "pushed-by-users" design process with unsuccessful previous proposals. The methodology developed, articulate structural analyses of the discussions (organization of discussions, participation) to actions to the code and documentation made by participants to the project. We focus on the user-oriented and the developer-oriented mailing-lists of the Python project. Findings/Design -- We find that key-participants, the cross-participants, foster the design process and act as boundary spanners between the users and the developers' communities. Research limitations/Implications -- These findings can be reinforced developing software to automate the structural analysis of discussions and actions to the code and documentation. Further analyses, supported by these tools, will be necessary to generalise our results. Originality/Value -- The analysis of participation among the three interaction spaces of OSS design (discussion, documentation and implementation) is the main originality of this work compared to other OSS research that mainly analyse one or two spaces. Take away message -- Beside the idealistic picture that users may intervene freely in the process, OSS design is boost and framed by some key-participants and specific rules and there can be barriers to users' participation.
Year
DOI
Venue
2007
10.1145/1362550.1362564
european conference on cognitive ergonomics
Keywords
DocType
Volume
boundary spanner,oss research,research limitation,main originality,distributed participatory design,process research approach,structural analysis,design process,online community,open source software community,oss design,python project,open source software design,open source,design-use mediation
Conference
abs/0710.1772
ISSN
Citations 
PageRank 
Dans European Conference on Cognitive Ergonomics (2007) 57-64
3
0.41
References 
Authors
15
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Flore Barcellini111711.68
Françoise Détienne245959.93
Jean-Marie Burkhardt356652.04