Coordination, communication, and collaboration in open source software development

这个项目将调查开源协作软件开发项目成功或失败的方式、时间和原因。开源软件运行着互联网，主导着网络服务器市场，并在操作系统甚至应用程序市场上竞争成功。考虑到主要的沟通和协调问题，这种成功是值得注意的，这些问题通常困扰着其他形式的地理分布式协作。但是，尽管开源取得了明显的成功，但大多数项目失败也是事实。该项目将对协调、社会网络和结果进行理论驱动的实证研究。第一步将是复制商业软件开发项目的研究，以确定开放源代码中的协调是否遵循相同的过程，或者是否根本不同。下一步将对开源和商业开发进行比较，看看是否能观察到理论预测的差异。接下来，构建开源软件开发的计算模型。模型预测将根据实际观测结果进行验证。最后，将进行实地实验，以在选定的开源项目中进行具体的协调改进。

This project will investigate how, when and why open source collaborative software development projects succeed or fail. Open source software runs the Internet, dominates the web server market and competes successfully in operating systems and even applications markets. This success is remarkable given the major communication and coordination problems that typically plague other forms of geographically distributed collaboration. But despite the visible successes of open source, it is also true that most projects fail. This project will conduct theory-driven empirical studies of coordination, social networks, and outcomes. The first step will be to replicate studies of commercial software development projects to determine if coordination in open source follows the same processes, or if it is fundamentally different. The next step will be to perform comparisons of open source and commercial developments to see if the theoretically-predicted differences are observed. Next, a computational model of open source software development will be constructed. Model predictions will be validated against actual observations. Finally, field experiments will be conducted to make specific coordination improvements in selected open source projects.