LibreSoft Technical Workshop on Collaborating Communities

Program:

15:00 Opening, by Jesus M. Gonzalez-Barahona

15:10 "Developing Free/Libre/Open Source Software (FLOSS). A Market
Driven Investment", by Nicolas Jullien

14:45 "Life as a Wikipedian: Open problems based on my experience as a
Wikipedia contributor", by Daniel German

16:20 "Visualization of blog community structure and evolution", by Juan
Julian Merelo Guervos

Where:

Sala de audiovisuales
Edificio Laboratorios II (basement)
Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, campus de Mostoles

How to get...

    * ...to the campus.
        http://www.urjc.es/comollegar/mostoles/cll_mostoles.html
    * ...to the building: in the campus, number 9 on the map.
        http://www.urjc.es/z_files/aa_infor/aa03/Campus_Mostoles.pdf

About the talks:

"Developing Free/Libre/Open Source Software (FLOSS). A Market Driven

Investment"

Over the last few years, FLOSS ("Free Libre Open Source Software") has
become a commercially viable reality of the first order. It is viewed as
an extreme case of open innovation (Chesbrough, 2003), and thus of a
laboratory for analysing innovation production in Internet
based/knowledge based industries.

It the FLOSS field an increasing number of companies are getting
involved in the communities of development (Lakhani & Wolf 2005).
Scholars (see, for instance Dahlander & Wallin 2006) have analysed this
as a way to control a complementary asset, without owning it (as defined
by Teece 1986, Teece & al. 1997). In this article, we defend the idea
that involvement can be of different intensity, from complementary to
specific asset, and that this intensity depends of the market of the
firm.

To do so, we surveyed francophone companies (France, Belgium,
Switzerland) affirming an utilization of FLOSS in their commercial
activity. Based on roughly 500 companies concerned, we obtained 141
usable responses and, via an ascendant hierarchical clustering (AHC) we
statistically verified a link between FLOSS commercial strategies and
degree of involvement into communities. We propose a typology of
commercial strategies explaining this differences in involvement.

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1298954

"Life as a Wikipedian: Open problems based on my experience as a

Wikipedia contributor"

During the last 2 years I have become a sporadic contributor of the
Wikipedia. In the process I have come to realize that there are many
interesting research questions that are worth exploring. In my
presentation I'll describe interesting issues I have stumbled against.
They mainly concern the relationship between content and authors, and
the impact of the main editor of a topic on its evolution.

"Visualization of blog community structure and evolution"

One of othe keys of keeping a blog community alive (or, for that matter,
any community) is to have a clear picture of the group as a whole and
the interrelationships between them. Most graph analysis tools provide a
static picture, so we have proposed to use the well-known Kohonen's
self-organizing map as a tool for community visualization. This provides
a static picture with much the same characteristics of a
multidimensional projection tool, but also allows to see how the
community evolves in time."