You can now cite my Fedora research using this APA citation
Harrelson Hubbard, D. (2013, July). An Exploration of Fedora’s Online Open Source Development Community. Paper presented at the Free Software Workshop, FISL14, Porto Alegre, Brazil. Retrieved from http://softwarelivre.org/wsl/blog/wsl-2013-schedule
You can view it on Scribd.
Hi everyone!
Just a quick update to inform those who follow me due to my work on Fedora. A version of my masters thesis will be presented in Brazil (via video) on July 5th at the International Free Software Workshop.
You can find more information here: http://softwarelivre.org/wsl
I’m in Session 4.
You can find my full paper as submitted here: http://tux.gseis.ucla.edu/WSL2013_papers/Harrelson-fedora03.pdf
There may be edits to this paper as a result of this workshop.
More to come!
Edit: You can now cite my Fedora research using this APA citation
Harrelson Hubbard, D. (2013, July). An Exploration of Fedora’s Online Open Source Development Community. Paper presented at the Free Software Workshop, FISL, Porto Alegre, Brazil. Retrieved from http://softwarelivre.org/wsl/blog/wsl-2013-schedule
Thank you to all of you who attended my talk this morning at FUDCon in Tempe!
For those interested in the community report on my research can be found here.
If you have questions, or just want to chat please feel free to email me (diana [@] cyber-anthro.com), comment here, or find me on IRC. I’ll also be at the conference through Monday and look forward to chatting and collaborating with you if you’re here!
Wow, it’s been a while I know!
On August 12 I presented my practicum / thesis to my anthropology department on the Fedora Project titled: An Exploration of the Fedora Project’s Online Open Source Development Community.
The unique part of my project was that I used virtual methods for almost the entirety of my research. The methods entailed the following:
Based on the data gathered during this research I was able to structure my findings into five themes.
In the final report each of these themes had key points that surfaced to support them and recommendations that were made based on analysis of the data gathered throughout the entire research project. You can find the community version of this report here. If you would like the full thesis / practicum paper (a bit more academic than the community report), please email me: diana [@] cyber-anthro.com. If you would like me to give the presentation again, just let me know. I am more than happy to share this data with anyone in the Fedora / FLOSS / Anthropology or Academic communities.
My committee was very pleased with my work and the results of my research, which culminated in the previously mentioned final report and presentation. With that, they signed off on the last of my graduation requirements and on August 13th I graduated with my Master of Science in Applied Anthropology!
I am hoping to find time in the coming months to write up a report on how I approached my research from a virtual methods perspective and did everything virtually from taking down and organizing field notes to daily interactions within the community. Not to mention the trials and tribulations of doing a study like this and lessons learned for those who wish to embark on a similar path. If you think you’d find this useful, please email me and nudge me to get it done!
Last year I applied and was accepted into the Interdisciplinary Information Science PhD (IIS PhD) program at UNT where I started this fall. I will be focusing my studies on Human Computer Interaction and Information Policy. Due to my academic record I was nominated for and subsequently awarded a fellowship that covers my full tuition for the next four years. I can’t tell you how excited I am to be continuing on with my PhD studies, daunting though they may seem right now!
While my PhD is not in anthropology, the program is heavily centered around research, which is where my anthropology background will be a huge benefit. I will be utilizing all of my anthropologist skills in each of my research projects and final dissertation. Being interdisciplinary, I am able to blend all of my previous education as well as my skills in information architecture, usability, interaction design, and user experience together into a combined subject of study.
I am very excited to start down this new path and my goal is to aim my studies on the same subjects I did for my undergraduate and masters degrees. Those being, gaming, social networking, blogging, online communities, and open source. My hope is to also extend this into the realms of the digital divide, digital property rights, net neutrality, information accessibility, and more!
Thank you to each and every single one of you who worked with me on my Fedora research. Every single one of you made a difference and I hope we get the chance to work with each other again!
Hello again Fedora!
I know it’s been a while, and for that my apologies. But you see, I’ve been working very very hard this last month and a half to bring you the results of the research study we worked together on. I want to thank each and every one of you who worked with me on this study. By taking me in at FUDCon Toronto, letting me bug you insistently over email and IRC, and letting me pester you enough to take the survey – we’ve been able to create something both interesting and useful that I hope you find will be worth all that time and trouble.
For those who want to learn more about this research study you can start here at the beginning or you can browse the Fedora tag in my blog for relevant posts.
Without further adieu here is the beta version of this research in two forms both a PDF available for download so that you may share it or view it offline and an online version available here on my blog if that is your preference.
Why beta? Well, I feel this can perhaps be improved based on your feedback. I’ve already conducted an alpha release with those who directly contributed to the interview portion of the study. Now I am offering you all the chance to put your own mark on it. This document I am presenting here is after all for you Fedora contributors. So, if you have any questions or comments or feedback in general please let me know. You can either comment on here or you can email me directly diana [@] cyber-anthro.com.
I look forward to hearing from you!
This seemed pretty apropos for today’s comic as I’m writing up all of the reports for Fedora at this moment using a combination of qualitative and quantitative data. 🙂
A very big thank you to everyone who has already taken then Fedora Contributor Research Survey. The responses have been awesome and I can’t wait until I can finish up the analysis of all the data and share it with all of you!
I’m Looking for just 20 more people to give me 10 minutes of their time to contribute their thoughts to the survey. Please pass this on to anyone that you know is a contributor. I am looking to wrap this up by Friday, so all of your help in spreading the word is much appreciated!
P.S.
If you are not a Fedora contributor, please do not take the survey.
You can read more about the survey here!
I had a few people come to me after participating in the interview process asking if they could blog about it. At that time I was not finished interviewing people, so I suggested that they wait until the interview process was over. Well now it is! (Has been for a while, I just wanted to get the survey approved and out the door first).
So, if you’d like to blog about your experiences and the questions / answers you gave, you are completely free to do so. Just remember, your participation is currently confidential and you will be exposing your participation by blogging about it. Which, I have no problem with, I just have to make sure you are informed based on the consent notice you signed when you participated in the process.
If you do blog about it, would you be so kind as to post a link to your blog post in the comments here? I’d love to see what you all have to say about it, and I’m sure other readers would be interested as well!
Again, thank you all so much for your participation, without which this research would be non-existent.
Now go forth and blog away!
p.s. —
Don’t forget about the Fedora Contributor Research Survey!
If you are not a Fedora contributor, please do not take the survey.
You can read more about the survey here!
Have about 10 minutes to spare (20 if you’re long winded ;)? Please share your thoughts in the Fedora Contributor Research Survey!
If you are not a Fedora contributor, please do not take the survey.
You can read more about the survey here!
Survey Now Available:
I am hereby inviting all Fedora contributors to participate in my Fedora Research Survey by clicking on the banner below!
If you are not a Fedora contributor, please do not take the survey.
Survey Details:
All responses are anonymous, so please answer as honestly and thoroughly as you can! Only caveat is that you MUST be 18 years old or older to participate. It should only take 10 to 20 minutes to complete, unless you feel you have a lot to add to the open text areas, which from a researchers perspective, the more data the better!
Spread The Word!
Please repost this in your blogs or anywhere else you see fit!
Feel free to use the code below to incorporate the banner shown above:
<a href="http://cyberanthro.limequery.com/44899/lang-en" target="new"><img src="https://www.cyber-anthro.com/images/surveyresearchbanner.png"></a>
First Time Hearing Of This Research?
You can learn more about my research by viewing my introduction post to it here and the research FAQ I created here.
As always, if you have questions feel free to comment or contact me diana [@] cyber-anthro.com!
Go Fedora!
And of course a preemptive congrats to all your hard work on Fedora 13, only 8 days away!
So, in my last post I talked about coding and no I don’t mean coding as in scripting or writing programming code (though it is just as tedious), I’m talking about coding qualitative data.
For those non-anthropologist among my readers, what this amounts to is tagging subsections out of large amounts of textual data with a taxonomy you develop along the way. This taxonomy is based on the themes that emerge as you sift through all of the data. This, if done meticulously (as of course it is), can take quite a bit of time and requires a bit of resifting of the data to capture and tag everything correctly.
Speaking as not only an anthropologist, but also an information architect, I actually really like this part! It’s to anthropology what sifting through the dirt at a dig is to an archaeologist. Each time something unique emerges from the sand/data there is a little *squee* that occurs. Each bit is just as precious as the last no matter how big or small. We collect each and every one of these unique themes and catalog them for reference later.
What happens after all the sifting has been completed is actually very interesting for dataphiles like me. You can then select any tag you used and see all of the text among all of your data sources that matches that tag. Or, you can line up all your tags as see which tags show up most often. Consider doing that to your blog, or Delicious Bookmarks.
You can tell a lot about an avid Delicious user, or at least what interests them on the web, by looking at their tags as a whole and then at their most (and even least) used ones.
Tagging data and looking at the results of that process is very similar.
Basically, it is in a sense both organizing your qualitative data and quantifying it. As you can imagine, it’s very revealing!
How else do you quantify qualitative data? Well you make a survey of course! Why would you do that? Well it helps triangulate your data. In other words, it helps you generalize your qualitative findings against a broader sample in quantifiable terms.
In order to do this properly we take those themes that emerged through our coding or tagging process then use that data to form appropriate questions and answers to be asked of the same audience but on a larger scale. Thus, we use both qualitative and quantitative methods in the research process giving it both depth and validity.
Could you do one without the other? Well, of course you can and many anthropologists tend to prefer one over the other. I’ll not step into the qual vs quant debate here, except to say that it exists. What I will say is that the goal of the anthropologist is to approach research and the research questions from a holistic perspective. Using both methods, as I am doing here, helps to do this.
Why am I going into all of this detail? Well, if you’ve reached this point you are in for a special announcement! My survey has been approved by my committee and is now in the hands of the IRB for review. Once they approve it, I’ll be releasing it to all Fedora contributors to participate in.
It is about 28 questions (depending on how you answer) and will take most people less than 10 minutes to fill out. I say most, because I do give you places for long text descriptions if you so desire, so those people who have a lot to contribute may take a little longer. From my perspective, the more data the better!
I have lofty hopes of getting about 100 of you excited enough to participate. So, once I release it, I will need the help of all of the Fedora contributors that read this to pass it along and to tell those people you pass it along to, to pass it along as well!
An interesting side note to the survey is that it was created with the free and open source LimeSurvey! So, by taking it you’re not only helping Fedora, but you’re also supporting a pretty cool FLOSS project!
During the process of creating the survey I’ve become quite the LimeSurvey user. So, if anyone needs help with it, please feel free to ping me. When I’m done with this project I may even find a way to lend some of my user interface design and usability skills to the LimeSurvey project, if they want them. I have a few ideas that could make it a bit easier to use after having been a user myself.
I honestly cannot wait to get the survey out and start getting the data back. This part of the process is always so exciting!
It’s only a flesh wound!
I mean, that’s how the last month of the semester should start out right? Biting knees and all that jazz…
*Shout! Shout! Let it all out!* <--- Typed this out while listening to Disturbed over Pandora just now. Live blogging baby! So, back to the task at hand. Why yes, it is the last month of the last semester of my Masters. Though this is in fact the truth, I will not actually be graduating until this summer. Why? Well, my professor and I both agree that my practicum work is just so cool that it deserves a more in depth analysis in order to do it and all of my participants in it justice. This is why I've been talking with a few of you in the Fedora community back and forth for the last month or so and why I'm in IRC almost every day! This is also why I need those interviews back! If you'd rather complete the interviews over IRC than email please ping me! I've already done a few others that way, so I don't mind doing it that way if you're more comfortable with it. 🙂 Additionally, this is why I have not been blogging as much lately. I've been consumed with Atlas.ti - then of course my Windows partition (it only runs on Windows) on my Mac (only machine I have that will run a large enough installation of Windows to install Atlas.ti) crashing and eating my installation / HU with it, which required me to redo EVERYTHING all over again. Now I'm just waiting on the last 2 interviews to come back. This way I can code them and add them to my extended analysis, which is going to be used to verify whether or not I've covered everything in the survey questions I've come up with. If so, well then I should be releasing a survey to everyone soon! If not, well then I'll be filling in the gaps and then submitting another change request to the IRB so I can have permission to send the survey out. It's also why my brain is kinda mushy at the moment. Other things contributing to the mush are my grant writing class, my job where I am the ONLY user interface / user experience designer, and getting setup to start my PhD in the fall (which is a LOT of work!). So really, this is just a plea to those I've already badgered a few times to get back to me with your completed interviews as soon as you can! What's fun about this stage is finding all of the themes that are appearing in the data from the interviews. Fedora, you're an interesting lot of people! Yes, I really do love what I do!
I was talking in #fedora-mktg with Mel Chua today about my dilemma of finding a count of currently active Fedora Project contributors. So she whipped up a twill script in python to get a count on contributions based on FAS authenticated activity.
So here is a challenge to you other hackers, can you find a way to do this better? And, can you do it by Friday?
During this next part of my research process I will be posting a survey available to all Fedora contributors. Luckily, this part of the participation process requires no signatures! So, those of you who were unable to participate in the interview process* will be able to easily participate in the survey portion as it is completely electronic.
The long and short of surveys is the quantitative statistical analysis that can be performed on them. The purpose of my survey is to help triangulate the data obtained during the qualitative (interview/participant observation) portion of my research against a broader sample that is more representative of the overall community. However, in order to do this properly I need to know how big the current overall community is.
This is where I need your help. I need you, Fedora Project contributors, to help me find ways to get at least an approximate count of currently active and contributing participants that can be verified by some means. This could be getting the number for how many people own packages in Rawhide or even how many people have edited the wiki in the past 6 months. Being that not everyone owns packages or edits the Wiki, we need ways to count the other contributors as well. Also, there is likely some overlap between several countable contributing groups so we need to keep issues like that under consideration. I understand that it will be difficult to come up with an exact number, so a close approximation will suffice as long as we have ways to support how we got the numbers and they are verifiable.
Not only will we need to ways to get the numbers, but also the people who are able to access that data and get it to me. So, if you come up with an idea but have no knowledge of how to actually get the data in question, feel free to brainstorm on this post with other people! I imagine that by working together we can quickly and easily come up with ways to figure this out. I’ll be hanging out in IRC as always, so feel free to ping me there or email me if you have ideas, questions, or numbers you wish to donate to the cause.
Once we have a number, then I can come up with a quota and will be able to release the survey!
I look forward to hearing from you. Thank you very much for helping me out with this process. 🙂
*If you still want to participate in the interview process and have the ability to return your signature to me electronically (print/scan, fax, xournal, signing with a mouse) then please contact me diana [@] cyber-anthro.com.
Research design in anthropology is a tricky thing. It is the part of the process you do before you do anything else, and thus you do before you have any real sense of the situation in which you will be researching and the people with which you will be working. It is the place where you lay down the questions to be answered, setup ways in which you will attempt to answer them, try and anticipate all of the ins and outs of the process as well as all the steps necessary to be taken with all of the stakeholders, which in my case includes my client, my masters committee, and my university IRB.
Then you get into the project and start your research, and only then do you start to realize and understand what you’ve got yourself into and just how many things you didn’t anticipate. So far with this project, being a cyber anthropological based research study (all of the research is being conducted online), my problems have all centered around technology.
My first limitation was understanding the process to get my blog on the Fedora Planet blogroll. With help and some ‘hacking the system’ I got on and while at FUDcon I figured out why it didn’t work in the first place (I wasn’t a part of enough groups!).
Now I am realizing my second limitation, that of requiring a signed piece of paper from all interview participants before each interview can commence. Pen and paper is perhaps one of the oldest forms of communication and technology known to man and yet it is the one thing standing between me an several potential interviews.
This was not a hindrance I anticipated when designing my research study, and it is perhaps not something with which people who are not researching under a university have to deal. However, it is something I now realize is important and am bringing attention to in case there are others embarking on similar research studies with similar IRB limitations that require them to have signed consent forms so they can account for this process in their research design.
Were I to design a similar project in the future under the same IRB limitations, I would ask my IRB to approve an electronic encrypted signature on my consent forms.
Here’s to hoping someone out there can learn from my mistakes!
That all being said, if you have a means for returning a signed document to me electronically and you would like to be interviewed for the Fedora research project, but have yet to contact me please do so soon! All interviews will be wrapped up (as best they can) by Friday!
If you would like to participate in the interview portion of the Fedora research project I am current conducting, please visit my informational post on it here!
I need at least 10 more willing participants by the end of next week. The most convenient way of participating for all involved so far has been through email. So if you have a little time and wouldn’t mind answering a few questions about your participation in Fedora via email, please let me know!
If you need alternative means of signing the informed consent documents, please note that you can sign it via a tablet as well as via fax (just email me for the fax number), rather than being restricted to having scan your forms in and send them to me.
After some great suggestions provided by a couple of people on alternative FLOSS tools for conducting interviews online, I thought I would ask the community if there were any preferred web based FLOSS survey tools available?
I’ll be constructing a survey based on the interview results by the middle of February. So, I would like to get started on the construction of it as soon as possible. If you know of any, and especially if you have used any please let me know.
I look forward to your suggestions!
Fudcon Tornoto was a blast – seriously, it reminded me why I miss lan parties (hey, I’m a gamer!). A bunch of hackers getting together and hacking for the LOVE of it was just awesome to witness and be a part of.
The festivities took place at York University @ Seneca in Toronto, Ontario Canada.
Barcamp
Day one was done barcamp style. There were about 150 people or so in attendance. Everyone who wanted to lead a panel suggested their panel and had 30 seconds to pitch it. They then took their panel pitch page outside to hang on the wall. After the pitching was done, everyone had the option to go out and vote for the panels they wanted to go to. The panels with the most votes were then put into a grid schedule on the wall as well as translated to a Wiki page (that was announced on the Fudcon IRC channel), so people could schedule the panels they wanted to go to and stay up to date with changes on the Wiki as they occurred.
There was apparently a record number of panels proposed at this Fudcon. Even so, it flowed VERY well and came together in about an hour.
Setup
All panel rooms had their own IRC channel (much like is done at SXSW – just a meebo chat instead of IRC there), and each panel had a transcriber in addition to the speakers that would transcribe the entire panel (as best they could) to the channel so that people who were there could talk in a backchannel and others could remote in from places all over the world to participate. Additionally, one to two panels an hour were audio streamed as well as audio recorded so that they could be posted online later.
There were 40 panels in all on Saturday, spread across 8 rooms and 5 hours.
The panels were a bit segregated in that there was a developer tract and a user tract. Though the design panels spread across the both of them, I felt they probably could have had their own tract, and thus made sure to attend at least one of those. In the end went to at least one panel of each of these three tracts to get a sense of who was there and what they were talking about.
My Panel
My panel was one of the last of the day in a room with about 20 to 25 people or so. At first I didn’t think I’d be able to talk an entire 45 minutes – but that really wasn’t an issue in the end. You can read the backchannel that was going on while I talked here, to get a sense of what it was like and the type of conversation that was going on. It was also audio streamed and video recorded. As soon as I get copies of those I’ll post them for you. I will also post about just my panel after I finish the overviews of each day!
Dave & Busters – FUDCon style:
That night we all went out to D&B, paid for my Fedora. We got to enjoy little burgers, chicken strips, snack trays, as well as tea, coke, water and a bit of pool on their dime. At one point I was pulled over into a conversation between to developers on the best way to package software that took into account not only streamlining processes, and procedures, but also ease of use for the user. Then I played pool a bit (and sucked horribly). I was never lacking conversation as many times people would come up to me and strike one before I even had a chance to strike one up myself. It was fun, I enjoyed the crowd. People came from all over the world including places like Germany, Belgium, Italy, and the Netherlands.
Hackroom:
After D&B I was invited to participate in hackroom activities. In fact, they wanted me to participate in a specific project, that being creating a Design Spin of Fedora.
What is a Spin?
From their site: Fedora spins are alternate version of Fedora, tailored for various types of users via hand-picked application set or customizations.
This Design spin we created includes many tools required for designers and artists of all kinds to do their job using nothing but free/open source software. We came up with all the things in it by comparing what Mairin Duffy used in her Fedora environment versus what I use in my Macintosh (more traditional design based) environment. We found FLOSS equivalents for everything then had Sebastian Dziallas perform the technical part of creating the spin, while Mel Chua documented the entire process we went through in order to share it with others who are interested in doing the same thing.
As soon as this spin is made available I will be downloading it and trying it myself. It was rather interesting to see Mairin’s panel on Inkscape and realize she does exactly what I do in an open source program, where I use proprietary programs such as Omni Graffle or Visio to get the job done.
It was very nice that not only did they invite me to hangout in the Hackroom, but they also found something they wanted me to participate in.
I think we ended up getting to bed around 3am only to start it all over again at about 8am the next day!
