The PI and his graduate students are active OSS researchers, and experienced in e-Science portal and collaboratory design, database technology, search, retrieval and data mining.
Intellectual Merit: A self-sustaining community resource a data repository and infrastructure supporting researchers studying the important OSS phenomenon will be developed, deployed, and maintained. The proposed project will preserve, extend and share a unique one-of-a-kind data repository supporting scholarly research on the OSS phenomenon; additional users of the data include researchers in the fields of data mining, software engineering, management, information systems and social science.
Broader impact: Under represented groups will be recruited for participation on the project. The community resource will enable increased quantity and quality of research on OSS that could promote better decisions affecting US economic competitiveness, cyber-security, government policy, and the design of scientific cyberinfrastructure and critical industrial infrastructure. The community resource may support research beyond OSS, into areas such as organizational theory, social sciences, and commercial software engineering, and may provide a model for community resources in other research domains.
Summary: A large one-of-a-kind research data repository serving a large and growing research community, needs reliable equipment and graduate student support to preserve, organize, and expand its data and services. The research area is an open Source Software development that studies an important but not well-understood phenomenon will be well served by this unique Community Resource.
