[SwarmFest2004] SwarmFest2004 - Poster Abstact

[Greg Madey]

All ... sorry for being late. I hope you can still accept this?  Greg

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Simulating an Artificial Society: The Free/Open Source Software 
Community

We report the latest results from an ongoing study of Free/Open Source 
Software (F/OSS) development at the community level. A computer 
simulation of the F/OSS community is developed using Java/Swarm and a 
relational database. Empirical data is used to parameterize the 
simulation, which in turn is used to investigate hypotheses about 
processes and mechanisms leading to F/OSS community formation. 
Successive “computer experiments” using the simulation have been 
conducted to test various hypothesis about mechanisms and processes at 
play in the F/OSS developer community. Publicly available data about 
F/OSS projects, developers, processes, and their relationships have 
been collected from F/OSS hosting sites, including SourceForge and 
others. Numerous descriptive statistics, including the existence of 
many power-law relationships, are presented. The F/OSS community is 
modeled as a collection of ad hoc, social networks consisting of 
heterogeneous agents, self-organizing into projects and clusters of 
projects. The quantitative data, the model, and the simulation offer 
insight into F/OSS project coordination and communication.

Greg Madey
Computer Science & Engineering
University of Notre Dame
address@hidden

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