Call for participation for the Research Room @ FOSDEM 2008

[Israel Herraiz <herraiz gsyc escet urjc es>]

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[Feel free to redistribute it. Thanks for your collaboration]

Call for Participation

Research Room @ FOSDEM: Libre software communities meet research community

Introducing Research Friendly

http://libresoft.es/Activities/Research_activities/fosdem2008

Joint workshop sponsored by the FLOSSMETRICS, QUALOSS, SQO-OSS, MANCOOSI and
FLOSSMole research projects

The workshop will take place in the Research Room in FOSDEM 2008, to be
held on Brussels next February 23rd and 24th 2008.

Many research projects (among them those sponsoring this workshop) are running
under the scope of the Framework Programme of the European
Commission. Those projects need to study different data sources
belonging to libre software projects. For instance, a Subversion
repository is a valuable source of information for research. However,
its main purpose is not research, but source code version control,
etc. This issue generates an impact on the project when the repository
is used for research purposes (think for instance of the bandwidth
used). In order to minimize the impact of the research activities in
the life and resources of the libre software communities, we proudly
announce the launching of the Research Friendly initiative. 
This initiative pretends to be a meeting point among developers and
researchers. With more detail, Research Friendly will provide:

 * Meeting point for surveys. When a researcher wants to make a survey
   to developers, that survey will be made available in
   ResearchFriendly.org. Once a year we will launch a call for
   surveys, intended for developers to reply to the surveys. 

 * Repositories of the different projects. ResearchFriendly.org will
   mirror the different repositories, so all those data sources are
   available for researchers without requiring any extra resource from
   the libre software community.

 * Results will be fed back to the communities collaborating in the
   initiative.

FOSDEM, probably the largest meeting point for libre software developers in
Europe, provides an opportunity for this contact and exchange of ideas. The
idea of the Research Room at FOSDEM is to explore the opportunities of this
exchange, and what happens when developers and researchers are put together
in the same (physical) space.

To frame and provide input to this ResearchFriendly initiative, we're
asking for contributions both from researchers and developers, on the
following topics (the list is not exhaustive), to be presented at the
Resarch Room @ FOSDEM:

   * What developers feel could be useful from research on libre software
   * Feedback from the developer community to researchers
   * Experiences of developers and researchers working together
   * Results of applying research methodologies and analysis to libre
software projects
   * Results (including expected results) of research projects studying libre
software
   * What can the research community offer to libre software development
   * Methodologies and techniques that could be used to address specific
problems in libre software development

Although academic presentations are welcome, other, more informal (and maybe
provocative) contributions are also encouraged. The main target is to have a
good collection of ideas and experiences to foster discussion and
interaction.

Those interested in contributing are invited to submit a short paper in PDF
format, summarizing the intended contents of the presentation (probably two
or three pages are enough, but no paper will be rejected for being too long).
It should provide enough information to let the organizing committee decide
on its appropriateness for the workshop, and the potential interest for
participants.

   * Deadline for submissions: January 24th 2008
   * Notification of acceptance: January 31st 2008
   * Dates: February 23rd (afternoon; workshop) and 24th (morning; demos)
2008

Submissions should be sent to both addresses below, by the deadline:

   * Jesus M. Gonzalez-Barahona - jgb at gsyc.escet.urjc.es
   * Israel Herraiz - herraiz at gsyc.escet.urjc.es

Accepted papers will be published on-line, after letting authors provide more
complete versions, if they want.
Organizing committee (alphabetical order)]

   * Adriaan de Groot (KDE)
   * Jean-Christophe Deprez (CETIC, Belgium)
   * Roberto Di Cosmo (University of Paris VII, France)
   * Jesus M. Gonzalez-Barahona (Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, Spain)
   * Israel Herraiz (Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, Spain)
   * Stefan Koch (Vienna University of Economics and Business
     Administration, Austria)
   * Sebastian Kugler (KDE)
   * Martin Michlmayr (HP, Austria)
   * Gregorio Robles (Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, Spain)
   * Diomidis Spinellis (Athens University of Economics and Business, Greece)
   * Georgios Gousios (Athens University of Economics and Business, Greece)
   * Ioannis Stamelos (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece)
   * Megan Squire Conklin (Elon University, USA)
   * James Howison (Syracuse University, USA)
   * Greg Madey (University of Notre-Dame, USA)
   * Daniel M. German (University of Victoria, Canada)
   * Stephane Lauriere (Mandriva, France)

Sponsoring projects

The Research Room at FOSDEM is sponsored by the following projects (although
the meeting is completely open to anyone interested):

   * FLOSSMETRICS
   * QUALOSS
   * SQO-OSS
   * MANCOOSI
   * FLOSSMole 

Most of these projects are funded in part by the European Commission, under
the Information Society Technologies (IST) research programme of the Sixth
Framework Program. A list of the IST projects in the area of Software
Technologies is available from http://cordis.europa.eu/ist/st/projects.htm.