Re: Can you help me to merge your avatars?

[Mathieu Goeminne <mgoeminne gmail com>]

Hello,

Thanks for your very precious and rapid feedback. I talked to my PhD supervisor, Professor Tom Mens about it (head of the software engineering group of the university, in CC of this mail), and he proposed to sign a non-disclosure agreement in which we promise not to make available the information about the physical persons involved (or the identities and logins they use).
For our research purposes, the results we will produce will not contain any personal information.Essentially, our results will be primarily numerical and visual results that will be analysed statistically. We will ensure to respect any privacy policy that will be imposed.

Concerning your second remark about git.gnome.org, we already use the guidelines you suggest, but they are not sufficient for our analysis purposes, since we still find quite a number of false positives and false negatives during our data analysis, and moreover this data does not contain information about identities used by the maillers and bug trackers.

Our goal is to have a really unified view on the different data sources used during OSS development (committers, bug trackers, mailers), which is why the information contained in your LDAP will be very useful to us. Of course, we do not need *all* the information stored in the LDAP, only the information that will allow us to link identities to real persons. (Things like passwords and so on are entirely irrelevant for us, of course.)

We therefore hope that we still will be able to obtain the information stored in LDAP (or a reduced version of it, or a similar data source), as it will really help us in understanding how open source software ecosystems evolve.

If you wish, feel free to directly discuss with my supervisor about it. In fact, he is sitting next to me while I am writing this mail ;-)

Mathieu Goeminne

2010/11/24 Johannes Schmid <jhs jsschmid de>

Hi!

> Have you a correspondency table such that using it I can say "this
> person and this one are actually the same physical person"? I'm
> focused on the committers, mailers and bug reporters.

I am pretty sure gnome.org has this in the LDAP but I wouldn't like
gnome.org to give this information because I consider that confident and
private.

Actually nearly all commits to git.gnome.org happen with the full
name/email which means it is absolutely no problem to link nickname and
name here for people that give their correct name. Anyway gnome.org
doesn't check in any way that people give their real name so it
perfectly possible that people don't use their real name for
registration and nobody will ever find out.

Regards,
Johannes