Thinking smaller
November 24, 2008
I want to break my dissertation into smaller, more managable sub-projects.
Thinking smaller
I’m thinking that my project (doing design research to reveal power relations in open source communities) is a big project, and that I need to break it into intermediate steps that I can turn into publishable papers. What I’m afraid of doing is a large project that takes many years and produces one paper at the end, after a drought. One step, of course, is the review paper of prior work, and I had always planned to do that. Certainly the research community appreciates review papers, and we always need more. But review papers, I’m guessing, only count for so much in your publishing history.
Terry Ryan suggested to me in our Social Learning Software Laboratory group meeting of Nov 8 that I should seriously consider what particular model of power in organizations I adopt, because some may be better suited for open source communities than others. The question of what power model to use is then becomes the first concrete part of the fundamental question I have about how open source communities compare to the traditional firm. Are they different, in what ways are they different, and how does that affect the design of my tool to visualize power networks in OSS communities? If power manifests itself differently in OSS communities than than it does in the traditional firm, I want to know, and I want to know early, because that’s core to how my tool will work.
What I am considering doing is an initial study in which I test a model of power in open source communities to see if it is a good fit. Then, if it’s a good fit, use that model in my tool. I world do some background research to see if anyone has (a) studied power in the context of OSS communities and (b) in a context similar to the that of OSS communities. In (b) I mean other types of communities which share the same economic and end goal characterististics of OSS — possibly USENET newsgroups, online health forums, fan clubs, others?). Then I would survey or interview people who work in OSS communtities whether the model seems accurate.
