Information management as an explicit role in OSS projects: a case study

Abstract

Globally distributed teams of volunteers and communication by electronic means are at the core of Open Source Software development. To help 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.