Port 25: The Open Source Community at Microsoft : Video, OSS Research

Barry Wellman, SD Clark Professor of Sociology, on Social Network Analysis and Community

Bryan Kirschner — Fri, 15 Dec 2006 19:46:00 GMT

Web 2.0. Enterprise 2.0. Open Source 2.0. All the latest expectations for major revs of a good chunk of the information technology world seem to be heavily based on excitement about the possibilities for new forms of social networking and collaboration.

Nobody has more to say about how this can be done right—or wrong—than Barry Wellman.

Dr. Barry Wellman is the S.D. Clark Professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto and is the director of Netlab, a scholarly network studying computer networks, communication networks, and social networks. To quote from an introduction to a tribute event, Barry “pioneered innovative approaches to three fields:

Social network/structural analysis,
Personal community and social support analysis, and
The study of cybersociety (which he calls "living networked in a wired world").”

He has authored 3 books and more than 200 journal articles. He is, to use images from social network analysis, perhaps the biggest “hub” of folks—students, former students, and industry and academic collaborators—who study online and offline communities (including open source communities) there is.

He’s also a really nice guy and was kind enough to take a few minutes to talk with us while he was at the University of Washington’s ISchool talking about “What is the Internet Doing to Community and Vice Versa?.”

Video: Barry Wellman on Social Network Analysis

Open Standards, Open Formats, and Open Source: Bryan Kirschner Interviews Alfonso Fuggetta

MichaelF — Thu, 24 Aug 2006 22:47:00 GMT

Alfonso Fuggetta is a Professor of Software Engineering at Politecnico di Milano in Italy, CEO of CEFRIEL and Faculty Associate for the University of California, Irvine's Institute of Software Research. Among his many activities, Alfonso advises European Policy Makers on Information Technology Issues.

A paper, written by Professor Fuggetta: Open Standards, Open Formats, and Open Source is widely circulated at Microsoft as a helpful guide in thinking about Open Source, Standards and Formats.

In this interview Bryan and Professor Fuggetta discuss his views on Open Source, Standards and Formats as well as why he chose to write this valuable paper.

Video: Bryan Kirschner Interviews Alfonso Fuggetta“”<

Khaled El Emam, University of Ottawa, on the ROI of Code Quality

jcannon — Fri, 14 Jul 2006 20:01:00 GMT

Anandeep interviews Khaled El Emam, Professor at the University of Ottawa, Canada. Khaled's research looks very deeply at how bugs and software defects introduced in software development impact an organization after purchase and deployment. His assertion, the more bugs and issues in deployed software, the more downtime, support and maintenace costs are incurred post-purchase. Thus, evaluating code quality upfront can be a helpful tool in predicting ROI. The less bugs, the less code maintenance. Khaled's research looks at both commercial and open source software development projects and has uncovered some interesting insights.

Video: Khaled El Emam, University of Ottawa, on the ROI of Code Quality

Related Links:
ROI From Software Quality - Samples from Khaled's Book
Check out ROI From Software Quality (Amazon)
Learn more about Khaled El Eman (Short Bio)

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Researching Source Code Quality

admin — Thu, 25 May 2006 23:37:00 GMT

Sam Ramji interviews Brendan Murphy to discuss his research on source code quality.

Video: Sam Ramji interviews Brendan Murphy to discuss his research on source code

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