Hi folks,
just got this email from the sakai mailing list and thought it might be useful for OpenACS and .LRN as well:
...As the Sakai Community begins to find our collective way, I would like to call your attention to what I hope you will find to be an interesting and relevant dissertation from Martin Aspeli of the London School of Economics:
http://dissertation.martinaspeli.net/
Plone has been brought up in the Sakai community before (such as during the licensing discussions), and this study of the Plone project touches on every aspect we think about on a daily basis with Sakai. Aspeli hopes his paper will, "not only assist researchers in better understanding the interaction between the various aspects of a mature open source project, but also help practitioners of open source reflect upon their own processes."
Here is the abstract:
"Many perspectives have been offered in the academic literature to explain the phenomenon of open source software development.
Unfortunately, most studies fail to adequately account for the depth and social complexity of the communities found at the heart of mature open source projects. Through an in-depth interpretive case study of Plone, a vibrant open source project, as well as an evaluation of the existing literature on open source, a model of a mature open source project is proposed. The model incorporates concepts such as the project’s life cycle, community-of-practice, culture, and business- and end-user orientation. Limitations to this model are acknowledged, and avenues for future research to improve theoretical accounts of the social dynamics of open source communities are suggested."...
