[Banshee-List] Banshee-Project as case study for my thesis?

["Tor Bechmann Sørensen" <kapipi gmail com>]

Hello Banshee community,

My name is Tor B. Sørensen, and I'm a student of Software Development
at the IT University of Copenhagen in Denmark.

I'm writing to this list, because I want to find out if it would be
possible for me to use the Banshee Project as a case study for my
Master Thesis.

In the thesis I am going to investigate why some recent OSS (Open
Source Software) communities are really good at producing good
software very fast. I want to pin down some of the main factors that
make collaboration so efficient in these communities. I will mainly be
looking at the tools used in the collaboration, and at the
organizational culture of the communities.

I want to base my analysis on data gathered from a case study. So, I
am looking for a handful of community members, who can help me out by
participating in interviews and/or questionaries.

At this moment my research design is still a bit fuzzy, but I am
probably going to need to interview both core developers as well as
people who contribute in other ways than coding, such as people who
frequently submit bug reports, people who participates frequently in
the mailinglist, people who are active on the IRC channel, and so on.

I need to carry out the main part of the field work during December,
and perhaps to do some follow up research during the first half of
January. I don't expect the interviews or questionaries to take more
than maybe an hour per person, and I am flexible as to the "when" and
"how".

For now, I am not necessarily asking for specific commitments from
specific persons. But I need something like a general indication of
whether it would be possible to carry out the field work that I have
described. Of course volunteers are very welcome to step forward
already :-D.

You might want to know why I have chosen to look at the Banshee
Community? Well here's my main reasons:

- The Banshee team is very productive
- Banshee seems to have a rapidly growing user base
- I am a Banshee user for about half a year and I like the software
- Banshee is end user software, and I believe this makes for a
different kind of collaboration than the one seen around less user
oriented projects (for instance the linux kernel development)
- The Banshee community consists of a blend of voluntary contributors
and paid developers, and I would like to see how this affects the
organizational culture
- Banshee is based on mono, which is a bit "untraditional" for an OSS project
- Banshee is affiliated with Gnome & Novell, and I would like to know
if/how this affiliation has influenced the collaborative culture of
the community
- Banshee has a medium sized community, enough core members to make
coordination and collaboration non-trivial and therefore interesting
- Judging from blog posts & IRC channel the Banshee community seem to
be a friendly community

To sum it up, I feel that the Banshee Community could be a very good case study.

I hope that some of you will find, that my project sounds interesting,
and that you can spend a couple of hours on helping me by providing me
with field work data.

You are very welcome to contact me on email, irc (nickname kapipi) og
msn messenger (see sender address). Also I would be very interesting
on hearing any opinions you might have on the topic here on the
mailing list (I hope that would not be too off-topic for the list).

Kind regards,
Tor Bechmann Sørensen