Proposal #: CNS 07-08767 07-08437 PI(s): Conklin, Megan Crowston, Kevin Institution: Elon University Syracuse University Elon, NC 27244-2010 Syracuse, NY 13244-1200
Project Proposed:
This collaborative project, developing FLOSSmole, a distributed collaborative community resource in the form of a broadly-shared data and analysis archive, enables research on Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) and its development. With the goals of improving the reproducibility and consistency of the research and expanding access to the data, FLOSSmole collects, organizes, and shares comparable data and analyses of FLOSS development. A framework for organizing a system for facilitating access to the massive amounts of data collected by many simultaneous and currently unconnected FLOSS research efforts, FLOSSmole is designed to be a piece of research infrastructure. Because FLOSS development provides examples of successful computer-supported collaborative work, the project is relevant to various areas of research such as Human-Centered Computing and Cyberinfrastructure. It enables cooperation in data collection, aggregation and sharing. Furthermore, serving as a potential training ground for software developers, its development should teach us about software evolution and the understanding of how developers join and work in these teams.
Broader Impacts: Supporting improvement of a piece of collaborative research used by academics, practitioners in the software industry, and by society in general, the infrastructure promotes international collaboration and data sharing among research teams. Indeed, sharing code, data, schemas, queries, and experience promotes teaching and learning. The project should benefit students who work on it impacting courses and projects. Moreover, as an open source project itself the resource contributes to open and share data promoting collaboration, reducing duplicative efforts, and promoting compatibility between research teams.
