A characterization of the Linux community of Practice Using Linux Newsgroups and Bales' Interaction Process Analysis
Matthew Knuppel · Carolina Digital Repository (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) · 2019
The open source software community represents a new community of practice and approach to software development and distribution. It is important to study this community because their approach differs radically from the traditional development and distribution of proprietary software. One of the largest groups in the open source software community is the Linux operating systems community. The community of users of the Linux operating system is a widespread group that frequently communicates through on-line newsgroups. These newsgroups serve as forums where the members may participate in ongoing discussion, or "threads," reading other members' messages and posting messages of their own. The participants can discuss issues relative to the Linux operating system, ask questions, provide technical support, and generally engage in the same activities that a face-to-face discussion group would engage in. To increase our understanding of the Linux community, this study seeks to characterize the Linux community of practice through an analysis of these newsgroups. While quantitative studies of this community performed, there has not been much work done in the way of qualitative studies. The analysis is performed using categories developed by Bales' Interaction Process Analysis. After determining the newsgroups that we wanted to analyze, selecting specific discussions from these newsgroups, and coding the messages using Bales' categories of Interaction Process Analysis, we were able to establish a clear picture of the frequency with which specific behaviors occurred in the newsgroups. We found that in general most of the behaviors that occurred in the messages posted to the newsgroups were attempted answers, and the second most frequently occurring behaviors in the messages were questions. There were a relatively small number of messages that displayed socio-emotional behavior.