Towards a Data and Workflow Collaboratory for Research on Free and Open Source Software and its Development

Abstract

FLOSSmole is a collaborative data repository which collects and provides data for research on Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) and its development by online, distributed teams. The data is used by a research community that studies diverse questions from the evolution of software to how these groups make decisions, use various media and man- age change over time (Scacchi, 2007). This multi-disciplinary research community includes researchers both inside and outside iSchools, from many disciplines including software en- gineering, organizational studies, information systems and sociology, as well as corporate researchers. Since May 2007, we1 have been working to development this repository into an e-Social Sci- ence infrastructure capable of supporting, storing and publishing not only data but analyses organized into scienti c work ows, as envisioned in the NSF reports on Cyberinfrastruc- ture (Atkins, 2003; NSF Cyberinfrastructure Council, 2007). Further we are developing a pre-print repository which will enable bidirectional links between the data, work ows and published papers. The goal of the project is to facilitate collaboration to improve the re- producibility and consistency of research, collaboratively building a body of cumulative knowledge (Borgman, 2007; Finholt and Olson, 1997).