Editing Talks/FLOSS Overview and Research (section)

== Academic Work ==

Most academic social science has basically started where Raymond left off (e.g., von Hippel or Lakhani). i.e., Most researchers start from, "Isn't open source great? How can we understand its success?"

But this statement takes that success for granted.

* But there are a few awkward facts about this (e.g., Healy and Schussman)

In other words, by focusing only on the most successful projects, we are selecting on the dependent variable. From another perspective, we are measuring openness (or open sourceness) in ''legal'' terms while many of the most important barriers may be organizational.

I'm religious about free software issues from an ethical position. But I don't believe it's inherently better. I'm concerned instead with how we make it better. I'm interested in looking at the variation in project success and in the barriers to cooperation, sharing, reuse, and recombination -- all those things that von Hippel has already showed can play an important role.

Some snapshots or postcards from my work:

* Quality and reliance on individuals in Debian
* Cultivation of ethics in free software communities
* How free became open and everything else under the sun

My current work:

* Looking at community dynamics in scratch
* Trying to connect things back into design implications
* "Experiments" in real online communities