communication tools in floss communities

Salamanca, February 2007

Title in Black - Arial 40pt

COMMUNICATION TOOLS IN FLOSS COMMUNITIES

A LOOK AT FLOSS COMMUNITIES “AT LARGE”

- BEYOND THE DEVELOPMENT TEAM

Andreas Meiszner

AgendaAgenda

• Background

• Communication Tools in FLOSS (Free / Libre Open Source

Software) Communities

• Point 1 Type Tools – Knowledge development and sharing

• Point 2 Type Tools – Relationship and trust building

• Excurse Forums

• Summary

Background

The project behind: FLOSSComThe project behind: FLOSSCom

FLOSSCom is a 2 years EU funded project with the following objectives:

I - To identify the factors that contribute to successful knowledge construction in informal learning communities, such as the FLOSS communities.

II - To analyze the effectiveness of FLOSS-like learning communities in a formal educational setting.

III - To provide case studies, scenarios and guidelines for teachers and decision-makers on how to successfully embed such learning communities within formal educational environments to enhance student progression, retention and achievement.

IV - To evaluate the project and disseminate the results of the project to the wider community.

Background

Floss Communities as Learning EnvironmentsFloss Communities as Learning Environments

Why might FLOSS communities be seen as a good case for (virtual) learning environments?

• Open and inclusive ethos: everyone can participate, no charges, no deadlines, life long

• Up to date content; everyone can add, edit and update the content

• A large support network; provided voluntarily by the community member in a collaborative manner nearly 24/7

• Free Riders welcome – the more the better

• New ICT solutions are adapted early by the community

Background

Learning in Floss Communities Learning in Floss Communities

Informal / self-organized / problem based / practice based / experiential

/ incidental / reflection-on-action / tacit knowledge transfer by

observation, imitation, and practice / re-experience what others

experienced before / enabling re-experience by decreasing complexity

and transactive group memory / enabling re-experience by guidance,

openness and legitimate peripheral participation / enabling re-

experience by asynchronous communication and virtual

experimentation / individual processes of learning and collective

knowledge building / double-loop learning through social interaction and

competent use of technologies

Background

Communities Communities ““at largeat large””

• Floss communities do not consist only of the development team, and not every community member intends to become part of it

• The largest group of Floss communities are the user, which might be learner too

“at large” in numbers:

• phpbb2: 49 core member and 299.485 registered user*

• osCommerce: 16 core member and 127.749 registered user*

• joomla: 20 core member and 88.343 user* English language user community only

Communication Tools

General ObservationsGeneral Observations

• Though all of the communities develop software that provides a broad

range of communication and information tools, the ones being actually

used within these communities appeared to be rather narrow

• This is also true for the 3 reviewed e-Learning communities

• Although the e-Learning communities are aimed at producing state of

the art virtual learning environments, providing a broad range of

communication and collaboration tools, the forum seems still to be the

centre of the communities themselves

Communication Tools

Point 1 Type: Knowledge development and sharing (1/2)Point 1 Type: Knowledge development and sharing (1/2)

• 94% of the communities had a forum

• The ones not using a forum were 4 out of the 5 wikis plus the social software Elgg.

• 94% of the communities made a documentation tool available.

• In all of the 51% of the communities that used a wiki, the wiki was also used for documentation purposes.

• Wiki communities were also the only ones using discussion pages that could be found at 4 out of the 5 wiki communities.

• Blogs were less frequently featured in only 34% of the communities and not all of the blog communities used blogs themselves (7 out of 13)

Communication Tools

n = 80

5,0%4Video / Podcasts

5,0%4Discussion page

6,3%5Tags

33,8%27Blog

50,0%40Latest News Various

51,3%41Wiki

85,0%68News (Flash)

93,8%75Doku / KB

93,8%75Forum

%n

Point 1 Type Tools

Point 1 Type: Knowledge development and sharing (2/2)Point 1 Type: Knowledge development and sharing (2/2)

Communication Tools

Point 2 Type: Relationship and trust building (1/5)Point 2 Type: Relationship and trust building (1/5)

• Point 2 type tools are in most cases fully or to a high degree integrated into

the members profile within the forum and only occasionally outside of the

forum

• Besides the 4 wikis without a forum, other types of communities provided

generally more (or less) the same numbers of profile options

• This might be due to the fact that the forum software used already

provided a range of options “on board”, since...

• Most of the communities that are not developing forum stand alone

software seemed to use available third party forum solutions

Communication Tools

Point 2 Type: Relationship and trust building (2/5)Point 2 Type: Relationship and trust building (2/5)

• In 79% of the cases information on the members latest posts, publications,

or bloggings were provided

• In 75% of the cases, members also had the option to provide information on

their VOIP and messenger accounts – which appeared to be less often used

• 46% of the communities allowed members to provide information on their

interests or preferences, though again it seemed that this possibility was not

that frequently used

Communication Tools

n = 8010,0%8Own(wiki)page1,3%1My Tasks2,5%2FOAF

16,3%13Buddy list7,5%6Geo Map

46,3%37Members preferences & interests75,0%60Members MSN, skype, chat, etc. information78,8%63Members publications, posts, etc82,5%66Members Roles / functions / Groups

Including:95,0%76Profiles

%nPoint 2 Type Tools

Point 2 Type: Relationship and trust building (3/5)Point 2 Type: Relationship and trust building (3/5)

Communication Tools

Point 2 Type: Relationship and trust building (4/5)Point 2 Type: Relationship and trust building (4/5)

• Calendars and polls appeared to be generally less intensive used and the

availability of the tools might be seen rather as an “add on” / “nice to have”

• Integrated chat tools could be less frequently detected (19%), though many

communities allowed members to provide information on e.g. personal IRC

accounts within their profiles

• The “who is online” tool could be found at 58% of the communities and in 3

(4%) communities this tool was combined with a “who sees what” tool allowing

one to see what other members are currently doing

• A “Buddy” tool was provided in 13 (16%) of the cases and a FOAF (Friend Of A

Friend) tool in only 2 (2,5%) of the cases

Communication Tools

n = 8010,0%8Shoutbox3,8%3"who sees what"

57,5%46"who is online"22,5%18Polls23,8%19Chat25,0%20Calendar / Events

%nOther Point 2 Type Tools

Point 2 Type: Relationship and trust building (5/5)Point 2 Type: Relationship and trust building (5/5)

Communication Tools

Excurse Forums (1/4)Excurse Forums (1/4)

• Forums seemed to be the main tool for communication

• For 67 communities (84%) the posts per day could be calculated ranging

from 1 post per day to 1.260

• There seemed to be no correlation between the period the forum is online

and the post per day

• The most active community, Joomla, was only online for 410 days

• Also the number of members does not seem to have a direct impact on the

number of posts and threads per day (besides required critical mass)

Communication Tools

Excurse Forums (2/4)Excurse Forums (2/4)

Communication Tools

Excurse Forums (3/4)Excurse Forums (3/4)

Communication Tools

Excurse Forums (4/4)Excurse Forums (4/4)

Summary

• Forums seem to be a centre of communication within the FLOSS

communities at large

• Wikis seemed to be especially suitable for documentation purposes;

hence in all of the cases where a wiki was present it was used for this

purpose

• Wikis seemed to substitute prior existent documentation tools

• Blogs are still not that frequently present with only 1 out of 4

communities featuring them on their community site

Summary (1/2)Summary (1/2)

Summary

• Information on other members’ contributions like prior posts or blog

entries seems to be valuable information (80%)

• Buddy lists, friend of a friend functions, tagging, geo maps, and video /

podcasts are still not that frequently used

• Though these communities were building a broad range of tools, or

integrating them into the software that they develop, they still do not seem

to make use of it themselves

Summary (2/2)Summary (2/2)

Thank you for your attention!

A.Meiszner@open.ac.uk

www.flosscom.net