Abstract not found

community is growing across and within multiple disciplines. This community faces a new and unusual situation. The traditional difficulties of gathering enough empirical data have been replaced by issues of dealing with enormous amounts of freely available public data from many disparate sources (online discussion forums, source code directories, bug reports, OSS Web portals, etc.). Consequently, these data are being discovered, gathered, analyzed, and used to support multidisciplinary research. However at present, no means exist for assembling these data under common access points and frameworks for comparative, longitudinal, and collaborative research across disciplines. Gathering and maintaining large F/OSS data collections reliably and making them usable present several research challenges. For example, current projects usually rely on direct access to, and mining of raw data from groups that generate it, and both of these methods require unique effort for each new corpus, or even for updating existing corpora. In this paper, we identify several needs and critical factors in F/OSS empirical research across disciplines, and suggest recommendations for design of a global research infrastructure for multi-disciplinary research into F/OSS development. 1.

We seek to establish and sustain an agenda for a national program for research on free/open source software (FOSS, or sometimes FLOSS) by academic and industrial researchers in different disciplines. This proposal describes our vision for such a research agenda, along with the international workshop and supporting meetings we propose to conduct in order to develop the agenda to guide future research. The activities build from recent research meetings on FOSS support multidisciplinary studies of FOSS development. We also identify our goals, assessment method, activities, outcomes, and results from recent meetings giving rise to this proposal. Following this is a specification of proposed meetings and workshop, budget, budget rationale, and brief biographical description of the proposal organizers. Why we need a national research program in Free/Open Source Software Even though Free/Open Source Software (FOSS) is widely used, we believe the much of the Computer Science research community has yet to fully recognize its potential to change the world of research and development of software-intensive systems across disciplines. Tens of thousands of FOSS projects are up and running world-wide, and millions of end-users of computing increasingly rely on FOSS-based systems. Growing numbers of research projects in physical, social, and human sciences, as well as the cultural arts are now routinely expecting to develop or use FOSS-based systems to best meet their needs. Similarly, growing numbers of businesses and government organizations are now looking to develop and use mission-critical software applications that are built with FOSS components. We believe reasons for such attention and

We seek to establish and sustain an agenda for a national program for research on free/open source software (FOSS, or sometimes FLOSS) by academic and industrial researchers in different disciplines. This proposal describes our vision for such a research agenda, along with the international workshop and supporting meetings we propose to conduct in order to develop the agenda to guide future research. The activities build from recent research meetings on FOSS support multi-disciplinary studies of FOSS development. We also identify our goals, assessment method, activities, outcomes, and results from recent meetings giving rise to this proposal. Why we need a national research program in Free/Open Source Software Even though Free/Open Source Software (FOSS) is widely used, we believe the much of the Computer Science research community has yet to fully recognize its potential to change the world of research and development of software-intensive systems across disciplines. Tens of thousands of FOSS projects are up and running world-wide, and millions of end-users of computing increasingly rely on FOSS-based systems. Growing numbers of research projects in physical, social, and human sciences, as well as the

Abstract: The Free/Open Source Software (F/OSS) research community is growing across and within multiple disciplines. This community faces a new and unusual situation. The traditional difficulties of gathering enough empirical data have been replaced by issues of dealing with enormous amounts of freely available public data from many disparate sources (online discussion forums, source code directories, bug reports, OSS Web portals, etc.). Consequently, these data are being discovered, gathered, analyzed, and used to support multidisciplinary research. However at present, no means exist for assembling these data under common access points and frameworks for comparative, longitudinal, and collaborative research across disciplines. Gathering and maintaining large F/OSS data collections reliably and making them usable present several research challenges. For example, current projects usually rely on direct access to, and mining of raw data from groups that generate it, and both of these methods require unique effort for each new corpus, or even for updating existing corpora. In this paper we identify several common needs and critical factors in F/ OSS empirical research across disciplines, and suggest recommendations for the design of a globally shared research infrastructure for multi-disciplinary research into F/OSS development. 1.