FOSDEM '08 is a free and non-commercial event organised by the community, for the community. Its goal is to provide Free and Open Source developers a place to meet.

   

Research Room Developer Room

Room: AW1.120

Workshop on "libre software research meets libre software developers"

The "Research Room" will host a workshop with participants from the academia and the libre (free / open source) software community. The workshop will be organized in collaboration with the EC-funded FLOSSMetrics and QUALOSS projects.

The topic of the workshop will be "Research friendly projects". The main idea behind that label is try to smooth the collaboration among research and libre software projects. We are thinking of launching a service to mirror all the different data sources available in libre software projects (control version repositories, mailing list archives, bug tracking databases, etc), so all those sources are easily available for the community. For that purpose, we need the collaboration of the projects, to make the task of mirroring easy. We will provide results and reports back to the projects that would collaborate with this initiative.

Another aspect is that Research Friendly will be a hub to gather information about the developers. Think for instance of surveys. It is very typical to send hundreds of emails requesting the collaboration of developers to fill a survey. Research Friendly will launch a "e;call for surveys"e;, and will announce those surveys so developers may participate if they want. This will make the process much less intrusive for developers. Moreover, Research Friendly will publish the results of the surveys, so developers know the results, and can be sure that their participation has been worthy.

The workshop will present these ideas, with participants from the above mentioned research projects, and from the community.

For further information, the call for participation and contacting the organizers, see here: http://libresoft.es/Activities/Research_activities/fosdem2008.