Open Source Software Conference at UL

The 3rd International Conference on Open Source Systems is hosted by our University between 11 and 14 July.

As stated by the organisers, "the goal of OSS 2007 is to provide an international forum where a diverse community of professionals from academia, industry and public administration can come together to share research findings and practical experiences. The conference is also meant to provide information and education to practitioners, identify directions for further research, and to be an ongoing platform for technology transfer."

On Wednesday 13 July, our paper "Sprint-driven development: working, learning and the process of enculturation in the PyPy community"(Sigfridsson, Avram, Sheehan, Sullivan) was scheduled in a very select company:

• part of Prof. Kevin Crowston's team at Syracuse University, Qing Li presented the paper "Emergent Decision-making Practices in Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) Development Teams" (Heckman, Crowston, Eseryel, Allen, Li);
• Ari Jaaksi from Nokia presented his paper "Experiences on product development with open source", after giving an excellent keynote in the morning.

Last year in August, the PyPy project organised a sprint at UL. It was a madly busy period, but Anders, Daniel and myself decided to take the opportunity to observe the sprint. We spent part of that week in August trying to make ourselves useful to the team, talking to them, watching their interaction, recording their work sessions. They were so used to being studied, that they graciously allowed us to sit in and listen.



Early in January, we decided to put in a paper for the OSS 07 conference. The paper was accepted and this is how we got to participate.






Two other papers, presented in the afternoon, were also well connected to our topic:

• "Learning through practical involvement in the OSS ecosystem: experiences from a Masters assignment "( Lundell, Persson, Lings -University of Skövde, Sweden), presented by Bjorn Lundell;
  
• "Learning and the Imperative of Production in F/OS development"- presented by Evangelia Berdou (London School of Economics and Political Science, UK).