Research Question (Ethnography)

Research Question (Ethnography) Leo and Stacey

What makes a content management system open-source community successful?



Description:

We would like to focus on the Drupal, Joomla, and Plone communities. We will do this by observing online Joomla, Drupal, and Plone groups, attending meet ups, and conventions. We will also interview individual users of each software framework in order to get a sense of their personal reasons for using the product (brand loyalty, community connection, etc). We would like to see if there are any differences between the community connections for each of the content management systems and also, what the individual justifications for contributing to the open-source software without compensation might be. We feel that studying the differences between the Plone, Drupal and Joomla communities might allow us to figure out how to build other successful models for other open-source communities.

Specific communities to study:

Drupal Association
Drupal.org Forum
DrupalCon
Acquia
Lullabot
Joomla.org Forum
Joomla!Kur
JomSocial
Joomlapolis
Plone.org Forums
PloneCon

We would conduct interviews on and off line, observe forums, and visit specific shops for each software framework.

Some specific questions we will ask:

What aspects do users feel make their community successful?
Why do users contribute to the community?


Advantages/Disadvantages

We believe that there are only advantages to using the Ethnography method for our subject matter. The best being that there is a rather large pool of open-source users both online in forums and in real life at meet ups and conventions. Also, there are no real risks for subjects involved in our study.