Report: An Exploration of Fedora's Online Open Source Development Community

Diana Harrelson, an anthropology graduate student, spent several months surveying the Fedora community; a draft version of her report is now available. It looks at contributors' motivations and problems they have encountered, and makes a number of recommendations on how to make the project easier to contribute to. "The key here, and the large difference between FLOSS development processes and traditional ones, is that it's not the act of doing something that needs approval; instead it's the result of the action and quality of the work that must be approved. Again, this is where not only having a mentor program for new contributors is useful, but also making such a program highly visible, transparent, and accessible is important."

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