COMMUNICATION TOOLS IN FLOSS COMMUNITIES A LOOK AT FLOSS COMMUNITIES "AT LARGE" - BEYOND THE DEVELOPMENT TEAM
Andreas Meiszner · Open Research Online - ORO (The Open University) · 2007
During the past years a high number of tools were developed to enable and facilitate communication and collaboration in online communities, web based content management, knowledge building and learning. These tools provide new opportunities for communication, collaboration and content management (storage, retrieval, presentation and classification/taxonomy). Many of these tools were built by Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) communities; creating products like wikis (Wikimedia), blogs (Wordpress), or social networking solutions (Elgg). Research that was conducted in this domain seemed to focus mainly on the development team of FLOSS communities (Crowston, 2004); e.g. the KDE case study (Hemetsberger, 2004) or the Freenet case study (Krogh, 2003), and not on the community at large. The development team and enhanced team (core team) are only one part of the community and relatively small in comparison to the entire community, with the largest part being the users (Giuri, 2004). Focusing on the core team only, and not on the community at large, might lead to a very different understanding of how FLOSS communities communicate and the type of tools used for communication, collaboration and interaction and for relationship and trust building. To better understand FLOSS communities as learning environments it would be required to have a look at the communities at large and not only parts of it. An earlier study already initially analysed how learning occurs in FLOSS communities (Lin, 2005). This study focused on the learning activities and knowledge creation through mailing lists. To conduct further research in this domain it would initially be important to know which communication tools are currently used within the FLOSS communities at large. The Freenet case study, which focuses on the core team, for example,. suggests that mailing lists are the main way of communication within the community (Krogh, 2003). Another case study on the Apache community concluded that the main way of communication is based on forum posts, but this focuses only on the Apache support community (Hippel, 2002). These two examples indicate that communication within FLOSS communities and the tools used might differ, depending on the part of the community being reviewed (the core team or the community at large).