Group: Free/Libre Open Source Software

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• Andrea Wiggins	Friday 15 February 2008 @ 20:09:03 (GMT)
  	The workflow for dynamic analysis of communication centralization based on FLOSSmole data is now available for download and use with data for two IM projects, Fire and Gaim (now known as Pidgin). Please see the comment on the workflow or version notes for the list of project names that can be used; these details are also embedded in the Project_list input's metadata description.

• Ross Gardler	Wednesday 07 May 2008 @ 16:49:03 (BST)
  	OSS Watch (http://www.oss-watch.ac.uk) would like to invite you or a nominated colleague to contribute to an Expert workshop on profiling communities. OSS Watch is the JISC funded open source advisory service to UK HE and FE, hosted by the Oxford University Computing Services. This is an invitation only workshop designed to assist OSS Watch in their strategic planning of activities for the next two years. The event will be held in Oxford in the second half of July 2008. The date will be set to maximise attendance from invitees. Please indicate your preferences on http://www.meetomatic.com/respond.php?id=701IKD If you feel that a colleague would be interested in this event feel free to pass their details to me and I will, wherever possible, invite them. However, please note this is an invitation only event and will be limited in numbers. All travel and, where necessary, accommodation expenses will be covered by OSS Watch. For those needing to stay overnight we will have a workshop dinner in the evening. Further details about the event can be found below: Abstract OSS Watch is the National Advisory Service on open source for UK Further Education (FE) and Higher Education (HE). As such, it is part of our remit to help FE and HE institutions and projects who want to engage with open source development, and a key factor for that is the development of open source communities. We are becoming increasingly interested in a more rigorous approach to measuring open source communities and open source development projects. The workshop will focus in the following aspects: Taxonomy of the "fauna" in open source communities: developers, contributors, passive users, etc. Practical methods to identify "fauna" members in a community. Metrics of interest to profile communities, their health, evolution... Temporal evolution is of particular interest. After the workshop OSS Watch will develop a strategic plan to implement some of the most appropriate ideas emerging from this workshop.

• Andrea Wiggins	Friday 12 September 2008 @ 15:08:50 (BST)
  	I've recently made a couple of presentations on the use of Taverna in FLOSS research that may be of interest. The slides are available via Slideshare at the following URLs. http://www.slideshare.net/AniKarenina/eresearch-workflows-for-studying-free-and-open-source-software-development-presentation/ http://www.slideshare.net/AniKarenina/dynamic-social-network-analysis-and-more-with-eresearch-tools-525425/ http://www.slideshare.net/AniKarenina/social-dynamics-of-floss-team-communication-across-channels-presentation/ Enjoy!

• Andrea Wiggins	Tuesday 16 September 2008 @ 02:07:59 (BST)
  	Reposted from ossmole-discuss@lists.sourceforge.net, for details about how to get database access for FLOSSmole data for running workflows: ----- I'm excited to give you all a heads up that the entire flossmole database is now available directly via a MySQL server. We have transferred the database to the NSF TeraGrid Data Central   hosting site [1] (based at the San Diego Supercomputing centre).  It's   a bigger machine and professionally administered, which was much  better than we could offer ourselves. See below for access procedure. The process of transferring the database also enabled us to prepare comprehensive datamarts for each datasource in the database.  These are mysqldump files which can be used for local access to parts of the  database; there are two for each datasource, one containing the raw html pages and one, substantially smaller, containing just the parsed data points.  These will be available shortly and will be an option for those who want to install a local copy of the DB; although we'd be very interested in reasons people find to do that, we'd like to have people sharing useful transformations of the data and the Data Central database should be pretty quick. So now we have three great options for accessing the FLOSSmole data: 1. The traditional monthly flat files 2. Direct MySQL access to the full database @ DC. 3. Comprehensive datamarts for local access Database access further info ------------------------------ In order to demonstrate usage to NSF and to monitor run-away queries (hey, I write them myself. Often :) interested users need to contact the FLOSSmole project to request a personal username and password, which should not be shared.  Other than that simple request, we're not introducing any new AUPs or conditions. Initially requesters should join and email their request to the ossmole-discuss list (ossmole-discuss@lists.sourceforge.net) with a preferred username. We can review using the list that way if the traffic spikes.  Turnaround should be no longer than a business day or two (we email the db admin at Data Central with the request). OTOH when we, and hopefully you, publish workflows using the database, we would like them to work 'out of the box', without a potential user needing to request a user/pass.  To enable this, in addition to the full database we are in the process of creating a small database, with very limited data in each table (~20 rows in each table, just demo data).  This is to allow querying through a single, public, shared login which we urge people to use when publishing their workflows; once potential users wish to go beyond the sample data they should request their own user/pass and plug it into the workflow.  We're still figuring out the best way to do this (finding 20 projects with total data coverage is actually quite hard :) Hopefully this improves the accessibility of the datasets, and will likely result in finding more bugs; both from the migration [2] and within the dataset.  We're asking people to file bugs and request for documentation in the Sourceforge Trackers; although discussing them on the ossmole-discuss is always welcome as well. So, have at it.