[Promotion] Research proposal

[Tom Chance]

Ahoy,

On Thursday 16 March 2006 16:46, Sebastian Kügler wrote:
> On Thursday 16 February 2006 10:16, Tom Chance wrote:
> > We discussed doing some collaborative research on the KDE marketing list
> > and came up with the following as a possible starting point. What do
> > people think? How could/should we go about doing this sort of research?
> >
> > We've tried to get both meaningful data on target markets, based upon the
> > market segmentation analysis from KDE and GNOME, and to get useful
> > feedback from users with specific and open ended questions.
>
> Additionally to the end users, distributors questions, it might be useful
> to gather some data from developers. They're an important target group for
> us as well. Here's a first stab for a couple of questions:
>
> - Who are our developers, hobby hackers or company employees?
> - How does this develop over time?
> - If hobby hackers, why are they working on the free desktop, do they just
>   like writing code, out of a political agenda ("freedom"), in short, what
> are their motivations?
> - If companies are employing developers, why is that?
>
> Some of those questions might be answered by some educated guesswork, but
> not all of them.

There's lots of good research on this already, e.g. 'Why hackers do what they 
do: Understanding motivation and effort in free/open source software 
projects', Lakhani, K. & Wolf, R. (2005), 
http://opensource.mit.edu/papers/lakhaniwolf.pdf

Andreas Brand came to aKademy 2004 because he was doing some work in this area 
too. There are lots of sociologists out there who we could link up with if we 
wanted to know more about contributors.

Regards,
Tom

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