Information Management as an Explicit Role
in OSS projects: A Case Study

Christopher Oezbek, Robert Schuster, and Lutz Prechelt
Freie Universität Berlin, Institut für Informatik
Takustr. 9, 14195 Berlin, Germany
{oezbek, rschuste, prechelt}@inf.fu-berlin.de

Technical Report B 08-05
April 2008

Abstract Globally distributed teams of volunteers and electronic means of communication are at the core of Open Source Software development. To aid projects in managing their information, we defined a light-weight, role-based process improvement and observed its use in a longitudinal case study. Results gathered by mailing-list analysis give insights into the different types of information managed and their relative importance: While technical content such as how-tos and to-dos is most frequent, the amount of information regarding decision making is surprisingly low.

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