This is a presentation held at the Web Based Community conference 2007 on the communication tools that are used within FLOSS communities. Admittedly it neglects the aspect of mailing lists. A reason for this is that it focuses on the communities at large, and not on the narrower core team.

1. COMMUNICATION TOOLS IN FLOSS COMMUNITIES
A LOOK AT Arial 40ptCOMMUNITIES “AT LARGE”
Title in Black - FLOSS
- BEYOND THE DEVELOPMENT TEAM
Andreas Meiszner
Salamanca, February 2007

2. Agenda
• Background
• Communication Tools in FLOSS (Free / Libre Open Source
Software) Communities
• Point 1 Type Tools – Knowledge development and sharing
• Point 2 Type Tools – Relationship and trust building
• Excurse Forums
• Summary

3. Background
The project behind: FLOSSCom
FLOSSCom is a 2 years EU funded project with the following objectives:
I - To identify the factors that contribute to successful knowledge construction in
informal learning communities, such as the FLOSS communities.
II - To analyze the effectiveness of FLOSS-like learning communities in a formal
educational setting.
III - To provide case studies, scenarios and guidelines for teachers and
decision-makers on how to successfully embed such learning communities
within formal educational environments to enhance student progression,
retention and achievement.
IV - To evaluate the project and disseminate the results of the project to the
wider community.

4. Background
Floss Communities as Learning Environments
Why might FLOSS communities be seen as a good case for
(virtual) learning environments?
• Open and inclusive ethos: everyone can participate, no
charges, no deadlines, life long
• Up to date content; everyone can add, edit and update the
content
• A large support network; provided voluntarily by the community
member in a collaborative manner nearly 24/7
• Free Riders welcome – the more the better
• New ICT solutions are adapted early by the community

5. Background
Learning in Floss Communities
Informal / self-organized / problem based / practice based / experiential
/ incidental / reflection-on-action / tacit knowledge transfer by
observation, imitation, and practice / re-experience what others
experienced before / enabling re-experience by decreasing complexity
and transactive group memory / enabling re-experience by guidance,
openness and legitimate peripheral participation / enabling re-
experience by asynchronous communication and virtual
experimentation / individual processes of learning and collective
knowledge building / double-loop learning through social interaction and
competent use of technologies

6. Background
Communities “at large”
• Floss communities do not consist only of the development
team, and not every community member intends to become part
of it
• The largest group of Floss communities are the user, which
might be learner too
“at large” in numbers:
• phpbb2: 49 core member and 299.485 registered user*
• osCommerce: 16 core member and 127.749 registered user*
• joomla: 20 core member and 88.343 user
* English language user community only

7. Communication Tools
General Observations
• Though all of the communities develop software that provides a broad
range of communication and information tools, the ones being actually
used within these communities appeared to be rather narrow
• This is also true for the 3 reviewed e-Learning communities
• Although the e-Learning communities are aimed at producing state of
the art virtual learning environments, providing a broad range of
communication and collaboration tools, the forum seems still to be the
centre of the communities themselves

8. Communication Tools
Point 1 Type: Knowledge development and sharing (1/2)
• 94% of the communities had a forum
• The ones not using a forum were 4 out of the 5 wikis plus the social
software Elgg.
• 94% of the communities made a documentation tool available.
• In all of the 51% of the communities that used a wiki, the wiki was also
used for documentation purposes.
• Wiki communities were also the only ones using discussion pages that
could be found at 4 out of the 5 wiki communities.
• Blogs were less frequently featured in only 34% of the communities and
not all of the blog communities used blogs themselves (7 out of 13)

9. Communication Tools
Point 1 Type: Knowledge development and sharing (2/2)
Point 1 Type Tools
n %
Forum 75 93,8%
Doku / KB 75 93,8%
News (Flash) 68 85,0%
Wiki 41 51,3%
Latest News Various 40 50,0%
Blog 27 33,8%
Tags 5 6,3%
Discussion page 4 5,0%
Video / Podcasts 4 5,0%
n = 80

10. Communication Tools
Point 2 Type: Relationship and trust building (1/5)
• Point 2 type tools are in most cases fully or to a high degree integrated into
the members profile within the forum and only occasionally outside of the
forum
• Besides the 4 wikis without a forum, other types of communities provided
generally more (or less) the same numbers of profile options
• This might be due to the fact that the forum software used already
provided a range of options “on board”, since...
• Most of the communities that are not developing forum stand alone
software seemed to use available third party forum solutions

11. Communication Tools
Point 2 Type: Relationship and trust building (2/5)
• In 79% of the cases information on the members latest posts, publications,
or bloggings were provided
• In 75% of the cases, members also had the option to provide information on
their VOIP and messenger accounts – which appeared to be less often used
• 46% of the communities allowed members to provide information on their
interests or preferences, though again it seemed that this possibility was not
that frequently used

12. Communication Tools
Point 2 Type: Relationship and trust building (3/5)
Point 2 Type Tools
n %
Profiles 76 95,0%
Including:
Members Roles / functions / Groups 66 82,5%
Members publications, posts, etc 63 78,8%
Members MSN, skype, chat, etc. information 60 75,0%
Members preferences & interests 37 46,3%
Geo Map 6 7,5%
Buddy list 13 16,3%
FOAF 2 2,5%
My Tasks 1 1,3%
Own(wiki)page 8 10,0%
n = 80

13. Communication Tools
Point 2 Type: Relationship and trust building (4/5)
• Calendars and polls appeared to be generally less intensive used and the
availability of the tools might be seen rather as an “add on” / “nice to have”
• Integrated chat tools could be less frequently detected (19%), though many
communities allowed members to provide information on e.g. personal IRC
accounts within their profiles
• The “who is online” tool could be found at 58% of the communities and in 3
(4%) communities this tool was combined with a “who sees what” tool allowing
one to see what other members are currently doing
• A “Buddy” tool was provided in 13 (16%) of the cases and a FOAF (Friend Of A
Friend) tool in only 2 (2,5%) of the cases

14. Communication Tools
Point 2 Type: Relationship and trust building (5/5)
Other Point 2 Type Tools
n %
Calendar / Events 20 25,0%
Chat 19 23,8%
Polls 18 22,5%
quot;who is onlinequot; 46 57,5%
quot;who sees whatquot; 3 3,8%
Shoutbox 8 10,0%
n = 80

15. Communication Tools
Excurse Forums (1/4)
• Forums seemed to be the main tool for communication
• For 67 communities (84%) the posts per day could be calculated ranging
from 1 post per day to 1.260
• There seemed to be no correlation between the period the forum is online
and the post per day
• The most active community, Joomla, was only online for 410 days
• Also the number of members does not seem to have a direct impact on the
number of posts and threads per day (besides required critical mass)

16. Communication Tools
Excurse Forums (2/4)

17. Communication Tools
Excurse Forums (3/4)

18. Communication Tools
Excurse Forums (4/4)

19. Summary
Summary (1/2)
• Forums seem to be a centre of communication within the FLOSS
communities at large
• Wikis seemed to be especially suitable for documentation purposes;
hence in all of the cases where a wiki was present it was used for this
purpose
• Wikis seemed to substitute prior existent documentation tools
• Blogs are still not that frequently present with only 1 out of 4
communities featuring them on their community site

20. Summary
Summary (2/2)
• Information on other members’ contributions like prior posts or blog
entries seems to be valuable information (80%)
• Buddy lists, friend of a friend functions, tagging, geo maps, and video /
podcasts are still not that frequently used
• Though these communities were building a broad range of tools, or
integrating them into the software that they develop, they still do not seem
to make use of it themselves

21. Thank you
for your attention!
A.Meiszner@open.ac.uk
www.flosscom.net