***** To join INSNA, visit http://www.sfu.ca/~insna/ ***** Hello Moses, there's one paper I know of, "Managing the boundary of an 'open' project", about Debian's development community , by Fabrizio Ferraro and Syhoban O'Mahony. Debian, in case you're not familiar with it, is a non-commercial Linux distribution. The paper is called here's the abstract: n the past ten years, the boundaries between public and open science and commercial research efforts have become more porous. Scholars have thus more critically examined ways in which these two institutional regimes intersect. Large open source software projects have also attracted commercial collaborators and now struggle to develop code in an open public environment that still protects their communal boundaries. This research applies a dynamic social network approach to understand how one community-managed software project, Debian, developed a membership process. We examine the project's face-to-face social network over a five-year period (1997-2001) to see how changes in the social structure affected the evolution of membership mechanisms and the determination of gatekeepers. While the amount and importance of a contributor's work increased the probability that a contributor would become a gatekeeper, those more central in the social network were more likely to become gatekeepers and influence the membership process. A greater understanding of the mechanisms open projects use to manage their boundaries has critical implications for research and knowledge-producing communities operating in pluralistic, open and distributed environments. http://wwwapp.iese.edu/research/res_detail.asp?ident=37362&lang=es best regards, Mariano Belinky Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya On Jun 15, 2004, at 19:57, Moses Boudourides wrote: > ***** To join INSNA, visit http://www.sfu.ca/~insna/ ***** > > Hello SocNet! > > I was wondering whether those of you who happen to know any literature > on > social network methods applied to free or/and open source software > (OSS & > FOSS) development projects might be kind to inform me about this > (either > by sending me a personal e-mail or through the list). I should add > that I > just don't happen to know anything on this area and so your assistance > will be extremely valuable for me. > > Best, > > --Moses > > M.A. Boudourides > Associate Professor > > Department of Mathematics > University of Patras > 265 00 Rio-Patras > Greece > > Tel.: +30-2610-996318 > Fax: +30-2610-996318, +30-2610-992965 > > http://www.math.upatras.gr/~mboudour > > _____________________________________________________________________ > SOCNET is a service of INSNA, the professional association for social > network researchers (http://www.sfu.ca/~insna/). To unsubscribe, send > an email message to [log in to unmask] containing the line > UNSUBSCRIBE SOCNET in the body of the message. _____________________________________________________________________ SOCNET is a service of INSNA, the professional association for social network researchers (http://www.sfu.ca/~insna/). To unsubscribe, send an email message to [log in to unmask] containing the line UNSUBSCRIBE SOCNET in the body of the message.