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Research Topic "Cooperative Development": Your Org

Posted: Tue Nov 16, 2004 3:14 pm
by TheEdge
Moin!

In our university project about Cooperative Development we´re trying to analyze different types of open source projects, that are developed per internet in a cooperative way. Our interest ist to analyze, why projects fail, some fork (eg. X11) and some become quite popular (eg Wiki). We´re more interested in the formal and non-formal organisation than in tools. To get some idea about organisation I want to know how you work. I`ve pinned some criterias we talked about. I guessed some. Please comment on these.

-Number of developers:
I guess aprox. 6 Progs, 3 Graph

-Number of community members (active, doing tests, suggestions):
??no guess??

-Age: ~2years?

-Type: Hobby project, open group

-Finances: low costs, webspace paid by leading members??

-Aim: Stands on top of your site

-Organisation: Quite informal??

-Important tools: phpBB, CVS, Sourceforge

Please tell me some about problems, if there have been/are some.

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Our project homepage is http://www.informatik.uni-oldenburg.de/~iug04/coop/
(german, in construction) . Thanks for your comments.

Informatik und Gesellschaft - Gruppe Coop

Posted: Tue Nov 16, 2004 9:24 pm
by MisterMerf
I'm new to this project (less than a month), so not qualified to speak for it with ultimate authority. Some observations of interest:

The project lives (or dies, I suppose) by the forum. The existence of a beta version of the game hooks visitors, the forum holds them. While no one is working on this project full time, the forum keeps things "warm" when development or design bog down.

The most active and prolific forum posters don't necessarily have a direct hand in the design process, as many of them are new. New blood tends to talk the most on the forums (Ask a senior developer for a graph, perhaps. I think that a forum sign-up curve coupled with a membership age vs lines published per day might be interesting. Then plot average poster age across the life of the project...?)

I'll also come out and say the obvious: The majority of forum content is based around design ideas for the project (in sheer volume, I think, and certainly in frequency). This aspect of the project is particularly accessible because it is a game.