Abstract
This research deals with the investigation of inter-subjective dimensions of roles and participation in distributed design processes (DDP), as linked to group or social awareness. It is focused on an open-source software community – the Python programming language community – as a model of DDP. On the basis of semi-structured interviews, we show that participants agree upon a typology of roles based on evident activities and experiences of participants, and that this knowledge guides their strategic use of archives for maintaining situation awareness. Contextualized interviews on a specific design process helps in understanding how this typology of roles is instantiated in a design situation and how social awareness is distributed among participants.
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Notes
- 1.
The PEP process is similar to other design processes in distant design communities, like the Request for Comment used by the Internet Engineering Task Force, the XEP process used by the jabber community (www.jabber.org). This formal process is also closed to the consensus-based decision making of Apache.
- 2.
This PEP concerns the introduction of a module for decimal calculation, pushed by users in the financial domain.
- 3.
Faked names.
- 4.
Ernesto was not anymore part of the project at the time of the PEP, but was the owner of the first code, with Aziz, to implement decimal in Python. In this sense, it is referred by participants to be a contributor in respect of a code ownership value in OSS communities. For this reason, we do not discuss any further his profile.
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We thank our interviewees for the time they have spent to answer our questions.
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Barcellini, F., Détienne, F., Burkhardt, JM. (2010). Distributed Design and Distributed Social Awareness: Exploring Inter-subjective Dimensions of Roles. In: Lewkowicz, M., Hassanaly, P., Wulf, V., Rohde, M. (eds) Proceedings of COOP 2010. Springer, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-84996-211-7_2
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