Hello,

I am a student at Harvard University taking a Social Anthropology research seminar about Life-Online and communities in cyber-space. As my project I would like to study open-source software development and the communities that develop around these projects. I would be interested in writing my final paper on your project and the community dynamic it contains. I need to obtain approval from you and the people I interview within the project before I can continue. If you would like I could make this study completely anonymous, and hide the actual nature of the project and the identities of the participants. I just find the entire project you are running to be very interesting and would like to conduct research on the community that has evolved around the project.

If you are interested in helping me with my project, please reply to me directly.

Thanks,
Ansel Witthaus

I just need no one to dissent from me researching, so I will assume that no one has.

Basically I am looking to find out how an open source software community starts and the hierarchy it has created. To that end I would like to interview the founders (which it is my understanding it will be hard to get ahold of them), a few higher level developers, and a few people who just dabble. I want to see why people start them and contribute to them. I will be writing up a set of questions that it would be great if a few people could answer. I will send out a link to that in the near future. Thanks to those of you who have shown interest, and to those of you who haven't replied to me yet, I would love to have your thoughts also, even if you don't have time to answer all of my questions. I will make my findings available to all of you if you are interested in what my final paper is about.

Ansel

On Apr 30, 2005, at 4:23 PM, Michael Schumacher wrote:

Ansel Witthaus wrote:

Hello,

I need to obtain approval from you and the people I interview within the project before I can continue.

Thanks for asking.
There is no one in a position to explicitely give or deny you the permission to write a paper about The GIMP, though, so if the policy of
your research project requires explicit permission, you gotta change the
rules :)

Let's hope many people want to participate.

HTH, Michael