A Workshop to Establish National and International Research Infrastructures for Multidisciplinary Empirical Science of Free/Open Source Software

自由/开源软件（F/OSS）研究社区正在跨多个学科发展。这个社区面临着一个新的和不寻常的情况。收集足够的经验数据的传统困难已经被处理来自许多不同来源（在线讨论论坛、源代码目录、bug报告、OSS Web门户等）的大量免费公共数据的问题所取代。因此，这些数据被发现、收集、分析并用于支持多学科研究。许多项目正在建立替代的研究基础设施来支持这些活动，但这些基础设施往往是自主的，不协调的，导致重叠或空白。目前，还没有办法将这些数据聚集在共同的访问点和框架下，用于跨学科的比较、纵向和合作研究。因此，从某种意义上说，美国的F/OSS研究社区是在违背他们自己的利益。现在正是举办一个研究讲习班以确定一项国家协调战略的时候。该活动的目标包括尽量减少基础设施作为冲突场所的发展（例如，跨学科，数据格式，让搭便车者付费，或限制无条件访问的规则），应对有限的资源，以及与国际F/OSS研究基础设施合作。愿景是为多学科的F/OSS研究社区建立一个学术公共场所，以开放的、全球可访问的和公共的方式，为社区参与者的思想、工件、工具和设施提供交流、共享和构建。这样的基础设施为共享共同兴趣的资源（例如，F/OSS数据集、领域模型、用于处理F/OSS存储库中的数据的工具、研究预印本和出版物）、公共资源池（像SourceForge这样的F/OSS门户）和公共产品（科学知识、Internet访问和连接）提供了一个媒介。这样的开源/OSS学术共享可能不会自发地出现，尽管它可能以一种特别的方式出现，其设计和操作不能为社区参与者提供合理公平的访问、成本或利益分配。因此，为F/OSS开发的多学科实证研究建立国家信息基础设施的最终目标是，以一种随后能够形成、整合和过渡到F/OSS实证研究的国际研究基础设施的方式这样做。

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 The traditional difficulties of gathering enough empirical data have been replaced by issues of dealing with enormous amounts of freely available public data from many disparate sources (online discussion forums, source code directories, bug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. Many projects are building alternative research infrastructures to support these activities, but these are often autonomous and not coordinated, resulting in overlaps or gaps. At present, no means exist for assembling these data under common access points and frameworks for comparative, longitudinal, and collaborative research across disciplines. Thus, the F/OSS research community in the United States is, in a sense, working against their own interests. The time is right for a research workshop to identify a national strategy for coordination. Goals of this event include minimizing the development of infrastructure as a venue for conflict (e.g., across disciplines, over data formats, making free riders pay, or rules that limit unconditional access), coping with limited resources, and partnering with international F/OSS research infrastructure efforts. The vision is for the multi-discipline F/OSS research community to establish a scholarly commons that provides for communicating, sharing, and building on the ideas, artifacts, tools, and facilities of community participants in an open, globally accessible, and public way. Such infrastructure provides a medium for sharing resources of common interest (e.g., F/OSS data sets, domain models, tools for processing data in F/OSS repositories, research pre-prints and publications), common-pool resources (F/OSS portals like SourceForge), and public goods (scientific knowledge, Internet access and connectivity). Such a F/OSS scholarly commons may not just emerge spontaneously, though it could emerge in an ad hoc manner whose design and operation does not provide for a reasonably equitable distribution of access, costs, or benefits for community participants. Thus, the ultimate goal of establishing national information infrastructures for multidisciplinary empirical research into F/OSS development is to do so in a manner that will subsequently enable the formation, integration, and transition to international research infrastructures for empirical studies of F/OSS.