With this study we hope to verify existing research regarding the importance of trust within these kind of projects, and further speculate on the impacts it may have. We are also curious to how trust occur naturally within online projects.
In addition to new interviews, you might also be able to draw on existing research and datasets to tie your thesis into the network of people already exploring this space. (You're probably already doing this.)
https://www.google.com/search?&q=open+source+trust+community yields some interesting results, especially the first three:
* http://works.bepress.com/michael_lane/10/ ("Trust in Virtual Communities involved in Free/Open Source Projects: An Empirical Study")
* http://www.mendeley.com/catalog/trust-community-open-source-software-production/ -- ("Trust and Community in Open Source Software Production" plus the "Related Papers" immediately below it)
* Both examples above are scholarly papers. Other sources would include social network analysis (Seb Benthall, who is on this list, may have more thoughts about it) and writings on the economics of open source by folks like Eric Von Hippel. Mako Hill has a nice collection of papers at http://acawiki.org/User:Benjamin_Mako_Hill/Generals -- not all will be relevant to your thesis, but there's good stuff there. The dissertations/theses of Biella Coleman, Martin Krafft, and Andreas Lloyd are all anthropology studies of open communties, and discuss trust at some point along the line (although it's not the main thrust of their argument).
* Individual contributors also write about trust a fair amount, which you can use in addition to (or in place of) interviews since they are a preexisting open dataset. An example is http://www.sutor.com/c/2011/03/open-source-communities-trust-vs-control/ -- if you watch the Planet feeds of major projects you're likely to find posts mentioning trust occasionally (examples: http://planet.mozilla.org/, http://planet.gnome.org/, http://planet.fedoraproject.org/ -- google "Planet <name of open source project you are interested in>" for more).
Finally -- from one qualitative researcher on open source to another -- watch out for your own biases when you're writing your questions and conducting your interviews. Even if you think open source is awesome and that trust relationships function a certain way within them, try to disconfirm your hypothesis, and check your questions to see if they're leading ones. (Think about the difference in responses you'll get to "is trust important in your open source interactions? why or why not?" versus "think about a person in the open source world you've never met in person, but have worked with and feel like you've gotten to know pretty well, and tell me the story of how you started collaborating and getting to know them" and then going through and coding that transcript for elements that indicate trust or trust-building).
Disclaimer: don't take what I'm saying as gospel -- there are tons of approaches to qualitative research, and I'm very much a student in this realm myself. I'm trying to encourage you, via this email, to think outside the obvious, generate rich data, sit and rummage around in it, and reflect and re-reflect on what you're finding about trust (a huge, deep, broad issue and a big word that can mean a million things) instead of doing what amounts to a quantitative analysis on quantitative data ("3 out of 5 participants mentioned 'trust' as a factor, therefore trust is a factor").
Looking forward to seeing what you discover. Please share your final paper back with this list when you're done!
--Mel _______________________________________________ tos mailing list [email protected] http://lists.teachingopensource.org/mailman/listinfo/tos
