The Free/Open Source Software (F/OSS) research community is growing across and within multiple disciplines. This community faces a new and unusual situation. The traditional difficulties of gathering enough empirical data have been replaced by issues of dealing with enormous amounts of freely available public data from many disparate sources (online discussion forums, source code directories, bug reports, OSS Web portals, etc.). Consequently, these data are being discovered, gathered, analyzed, and used to support multidisciplinary research. Many projects are building alternative research infrastructures to support these activities, but these are often autonomous and not coordinated, resulting in overlaps or gaps. At present, no means exist for assembling these data under common access points and frameworks for comparative, longitudinal, and collaborative research across disciplines. Thus, the F/OSS research community in the United States is, in a sense, working against their own interests.
The time is right for a research workshop to identify a national strategy for coordination. Goals of this event include minimizing the development of infrastructure as a venue for conflict (e.g., across disciplines, over data formats, making free riders pay, or rules that limit unconditional access), coping with limited resources, and partnering with international F/OSS research infrastructure efforts.
The vision is for the multi-discipline F/OSS research community to establish a scholarly commons that provides for communicating, sharing, and building on the ideas, artifacts, tools, and facilities of community participants in an open, globally accessible, and public way. Such infrastructure provides a medium for sharing resources of common interest (e.g., F/OSS data sets, domain models, tools for processing data in F/OSS repositories, research pre-prints and publications), common-pool resources (F/OSS portals like SourceForge), and public goods (scientific knowledge, Internet access and connectivity).
Such a F/OSS scholarly commons may not just emerge spontaneously, though it could emerge in an ad hoc manner whose design and operation does not provide for a reasonably equitable distribution of access, costs, or benefits for community participants. Thus, the ultimate goal of establishing national information infrastructures for multidisciplinary empirical research into F/OSS development is to do so in a manner that will subsequently enable the formation, integration, and transition to international research infrastructures for empirical studies of F/OSS.
