Dear Incubator PMC, Happy New Year!
I am a professor and quantitative social science researcher at the University of California, Davis. I have been studying online self-governing communities for a number of years now. I am writing because of a new project: we are beginning a comprehensive comparative analysis of the ASF Incubator projects, especially on how the self-organization in the projects and their governance styles interact to result in success. We are hoping to learn how nascent OSS projects can become more successful from templates of successful and unsuccessful projects from ASF Incubator over the years. To jumpstart them, so to speak, if they need help or straightening out. With a few collaborators we are now preparing a funding proposal for the National Science Foundation (NSF) in the US. I attach here the whitepaper. While it is basic research, this project may result in outcomes of interest to you and the foundation. In particular, we will be identifying rules/policies and social/technical architectures of OSS projects that are likelier than others to result in success. We are also planning to run educational experiments, in which we will start/maintain OSS projects with our students that will incorporate some of the things we are discovering. THE ASK: It would be great if you would kindly consider supporting this project of ours, by providing a short letter of interest/support that I can enclose with our grant application. Would any committee members here be willing to sign a letter of support for this research? You won't be formally committing to do or suffer anything. Additionally, we can spare you the effort of drafting the letter by starting you off with a draft that you can change as you please or leave standing. Even if it promises minimal interaction and strictly informal (rather than official project-level) assistance, a support letter from an Incubator PMC member would increase our chances for making the project a reality by demonstrating even nominal interest by people active in the ASF. Feel free to check out my research or that of my collaborator, UC Davis Computer Science Professor Vladimir Filkov (http://decallab.cs.ucdavis.edu/), who has studied OSS projects, including ASF projects, for years. Happy to provide more info on my qualifications and to discuss this in more length. Looking forward to your reply. Sincerely, Seth p.s. While I have you, I was rooting around Clutch with fingers crossed that I can find an archive of its reports over time. I'll resort to Wayback Machine in a pinch, or reconstructing past reports from Board minutes, but if there's direct access to the complete raw data, I'd love to know about it. Seth Frey Assistant Professor Communication, UC Davis https://enfascination.com/research recently: https://doi.org/10.1145/3359134 — Designing Digital Institutions for Participatory Change http://doi.org/c76k — Scaling of effective online institutions http://doi.org/gdzpj6 — Poker experts encrypt their reasoning with their cards
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