From:	 Gregorio Robles <grex@scouts-es.org>
To:	 lwn@lwn.net
Subject: (News) Research on Open Source/Free Software Developers at TU-Berlin
Date:	 Tue, 10 Jul 2001 16:14:51 +0200


Research: Who are Open Source Developers?

There is plenty of literature dealing with the process of developing
Open Source and its economical significance. And there are also piles of
text about the tools that are used in or for Open Source... but, what do
we know about all those committed developers? About where they come
from, what project they work for, what they know...?

To cut it short, among all speculations there is little to no empirical
data. That's why a research group at the Technical University of Berlin 
has started Widi (Who Is Doing It?), 
a questionaire aimed at the strong community of Open Source and Free
Software developers to tell something about their social, cultural and
professional environment. This data will complete automatic examination
of gigs of source code by means of freely available tools the research
group is refining.

The questionaire can be found in several languages on 
http://widi.berlios.de. The requested
data is recorded anonymously, no entry is mandatory. Interesting
up-to-date statistics, portraying the actual distribution on each item,
can be accessed at any time.

Anybody who has some time been involved in Open Source/free software
development is kindly asked to donate five minutes of her precious time for
filling it out. More than 5000 developers already have.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * 

	thanx for your time,

		Grex - Gregorio Robles
		grex@cs.tu-berlin.de