alerque
commented
1 year ago The long goal of my PhD is to understand how communication works in GitHub projects
The best way to understand this would be to participate in some FOSS projects yourself.
One possible outcome is a COMMUNICATION.md with instructions and tips about which channels could be useful and how these channels should be introduced to other projects participants.
Many projects out there (probably including LunarModules projects) could use better documentation, including targeted at new users leaning to navigate their existing communication channels. Documentation is something anybody can pitch in and provide, so jump in here or on other projects. This might even help you with the first point, that you need to learn by participating.
Just don't ask FOSS maintainers to contribute something else outside of their existing duties and interests. As a generalization we're already an over-worked an under-appreciated bunch and suggesting we do interviews and contribute time to somebody else's gig who hasn't shown anything in return is not the way to get the party started.
Hi. My name is Verena Ebert, and I am a PhD student at the University of Stuttgart in Germany.
A few months ago, I have examined 90 GitHub projects to see what communication channels they use and how they write about them in the written documents, for example README or wiki. If you are interested in the previous results, you can find them here: https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.01440 Your project was one of these 90 projects and, therefore, I am interested in further details about your communication setup.
To gather more data about your communication setup, I kindly ask one of the maintainers to do an interview with me. The interview will be about 30-35 minutes long and via Skype, WebEx or any other provider you prefer. The interviews should be done in November 2022, if possible.
In this interview, I would like to ask some questions about the reasons behind the channels, to understand the thoughts of the maintainers in addition to the written information.
The long goal of my PhD is to understand how communication works in GitHub projects and how a good set of communication channels and information for other maintainers and developers looks like. One possible outcome is a COMMUNICATION.md with instructions and tips about which channels could be useful and how these channels should be introduced to other projects participants. Of course, if you are interested, I will keep you up to date about any further results in my research.
If you are interested in doing an interview, please respond here or contact me via email (verena.ebert@iste.uni-stuttgart.de). We will then make an appointment for the interview at a time and date that suits you.
If you agree, I would like to record the interview and transcribe the spoken texts into anonymized written texts. In this case, I will send you the transcript for corrections afterwards. Only if you agree, the transcripts or parts of it would be part of a publication.