1. How open is the worldwide
Plone community?
Jonathan Lewis
Plone Symposium East
28 May 2010
2. motivation
• users are important
• some users become developers
• many users prefer other languages
• isolation of East Asian communities
• empirical evidence required
3. Research on OSS
communities
• social structures, decision-making, ...
• analysis of codebases, mailing lists
• Tang et al on global participation
• emphasis on developers
• emphasis on English-medium
4. Aims of analysis
• Newcomers’ questions
• Response rate
• Median response time
• Regulars also on English forums?
5. Data sources
• Plone-Users • Geeklog (en & ja)
• plone.jp • WordPress (en & ja)
• dzug-zope
• Plone Cono Sur
6. De nitions & tools
• newcomer: posted < 20 times
• regular: posted >= 20 times
• mailing list thread analysis:
• jwzthreading-0.91
11. Conclusions
• response rates high
• response times variable
• Japanese communities
• vibrant but isolated
• pros and cons
12. References etc.
• Reference
• Tang, R., Hassan, A.E., Zou, Y.: A case study on the impact of global participation on mailing lists
communications of open source projects. In: Proceedings of the 3rd International Workshop on
Knowledge Collaboration in Software Development (KCSD), Kyoto, Japan (November 2009)
• Contact
• Jonathan Lewis
Graduate School of Social Sciences
Hitotsubashi University
jonathan_lewis@mac.com
www.lewis.soc.hit-u.ac.jp