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和多个学科内发展。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、错误报告、开放源码软件门户网站等）的大量免费公开数据的问题所取代。因此，这些数据正在被发现，收集，分析和用于支持多学科研究。许多项目正在建立替代研究基础设施，以支持这些活动，但这些基础设施往往是自主的，没有协调，造成重叠或空白。目前，还没有办法在共同的接入点和跨学科比较，纵向和合作研究框架下收集这些数据。因此，美国的F/OSS研究界在某种意义上是在违背自己的利益。现在是举办一次研究讲习班以确定国家协调战略的时候了。这一活动的目标包括尽量减少基础设施的发展作为冲突的场所（例如，跨学科、跨数据格式、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，并与国际F/OSS研究基础设施合作。其愿景是让多学科的F/OSS研究社区建立一个学术共享空间，以开放的、全球可访问的和公共的方式，为社区参与者的想法、工件、工具和设施提供交流、共享和建设。这样的基础设施提供了用于共享共同感兴趣的资源（例如，F/OSS数据集、领域模型、F/OSS储存库中的数据处理工具、研究预印本和出版物）、公共资源库（F/OSS门户网站，如SourceForge）和公共产品（科学知识、互联网接入和连接）。这样一个F/OSS学术共享空间可能不会自发出现，尽管它可能以一种特别的方式出现，其设计和操作并没有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 The traditional difficulties of gathering enough empirical data have been replaced by issues of dealing with enormous amounts of freely available public data from many disparate sources (online discussion forums, source code directories, bug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.