From: Michael Totschnig <totschnig.michael@courrier.uqam.ca>
Subject: anatomy of Gnus as a project and as a community
Date: 20 Jul 2001 17:32:42 -0400 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <m2vgknmglh.fsf@michaelt.umontreal.ca> (raw)
Hello,
in the course of my Ph.D. in communication studies, I have been
recently involved in a research project about the free software
movement. Since Gnus is probably the software I spend most time with,
I decided to take Gnus as the object of my contribution to this
project. What I would like to do, is write a sort of anatomy of Gnus
as a project. Particularly I aim at
- understanding how development and use interact;
- describing how using Gnus differs from using other MUAs and news-readers;
- describing the nature of the community of Gnus' users and developers;
- describing the infrastructure sustaining this community, the material
and informational configurations that are needed for Gnus being
developed, maintained, distributed, installed, administered,
configured and used,
- understanding how the knowledge inscribed in, and associated with
Gnus is distributed.
In my methodology I intend to combine an analysis of the exchanges on
the gnus newsgroups, an interview with Lars (who kindly agreed to answer
by email and face-to-face recently when he came to Montreal), a
description of the workings of Gnus, and a survey of Gnus' users and
developers. This last item is the object of this posting.
I want to ask you to answer the survey attached below, and to return it to
me by email. The results of my research will be published primarily in
French, but I will at least write a synthesis in English and present
it to the Gnus community. I will cite information you disclose in
this survey only anonymously, except if you explicitly give me
authorisation do do otherwise. Any code fragments you might provide
however will be attributed to you, except if you explicitly wish
otherwise.
If you have any comments and suggestions about the survey, I'd be very
interested in hearing about them, too. I am interested in the answers
from novice users as well as from long term developers. If you know
any Gnus users who do not read the gnus newsgroups, feel free to
forward this message to them.
Many thanks in advance for your effort! Any answer I receive before 5
of August 2001 will be taken into account.
Regards,
Michael
Survey: Gnus, anatomy of a free software project
================================================
Michael Totschnig
20 july 2001
0) statistics (optional)
0.1) your age
0.2) your sex
0.3) your profession
0.4) your country
1) usage
1.1) Which version of Gnus do you use, which version of Emacs, on what
operating system
1.2) Do you use Gnus on your own computer, or on a system controlled and
administered by an institution?
1.3) For how long have you been using Gnus?
1.4) In what context did you hear about Gnus the first time?
1.5) How would you describe the original incentive for starting to use
Gnus?
1.6) Is Gnus your only mail user agent (MUA) / news-reader? If no,
which others do you use?
1.7) How often did you upgrade to a new version of Gnus until today?
1.8) how much time do you spend using Gnus (absolute and relative to
whole time spent working on computers)?
1.9) What are the features of Gnus you appreciate most?
1.10) What are the aspects of Gnus you dislike?
1.11) Has using Gnus an influence on the form or content of messages
you send?
1.12) Has using Gnus an influence on your relationship with the
persons or groups with whom you communicate by email or news?
1.13) What are the most important impacts of using Gnus on your work
practices (leisure practices)?
1.14) Did using Gnus change the way you perceive electronic mail and
Usenet (or any other systems you are using Gnus for)?
1.15) How is your use of Gnus integrated with other applications in your
computing environment?
1.16) customisation:
1.16.1) How much time do you spend on configuring Gnus?
1.16.2) What is the size of your .gnus.el file?
Is your .gnus.el file publicly accessible?
Would you be willing to attach it to your answer
(after editing it to delete personal information)?
1.16.3) What in your way of using Gnus differs most from the default
setting?
1.16.4) To what degree does your way of using Gnus realize the way an
ideal MUA/news-reader should work for you?
1.16.5) To what degree do you see Gnus primarily as a tool helping you
to do your work and to communicate, or as a toy to experiment with?
2) development
2.1) would you say that you have been "programming" Gnus?
If yes, has the result been kept for your own use, posted
publicly, or integrated in the official release?
2.2) Do you actively play a role in the Gnus community, for example as
active contributor (with CVS write access), by occasionally
submitting bug reports, contributing to discussions about
features and problems, submitting patches, helping users, or
maintaining other resources?
2.3) If you contribute to Gnus on a regular basis, how much time do you
invest per week in these tasks?
2.4) Can you describe you motivations for engaging in these tasks?
2.5) Name some of your contributions to the Gnus community, that you
consider are most relevant for other users?
2.6) With how much of Gnus' source code are you approximately familiar?
2.7) Is your engagement for Gnus acknowledged and/or recompensed by your
family, your school, your employer, or any other institution?
3) knowledge
3.1) How would you describe the knowledge you had to acquire in order to
use Gnus, can you describe how this knowledge evolved, from what
sources it was built?
3.2) How often in the course of using Gnus are you confronted with
situations where you have to look for information before succeeding to
do what you want? Can you describe one such situation?
3.3) Did you apply the knowledge you gained from studying the workings
of Gnus and from using it in other contexts? Can you describe one such
context and the kind of knowledge you applied?
4) community
4.1) Do you conceive of the users and developers of Gnus as one
community, two different communities, no community at all?
4.2) How would you qualify this community (these communities)?
4.3) How would you describe the relation between users and developers?
4.4) What would be the values shared by this community (these communities)?
4.5) What is the place of the Gnus community with respect to wider
online communities (Emacs, free software, Usenet, Internet)?
4.6) Can you think of any links between these communities and offline
institutions or communities?
5) infrastructure
5.1) Which of the following resources do you use? Specify how often, and
give any commentary you consider important about how they affect the
way you use Gnus:
gnus.emacs.gnus
gnus.ding
www.gnus.org
my.gnus.org
CVS
others
Please indicate if you'd let me ask you some additional questions by
email. Please indicate if you do not mind information you disclosed
being attributed to you in publications resulting from this
research. Thank you very much for your time!
--
Michael Totschnig
PGP/GPG-Public-Key: http://www.er.uqam.ca/nobel/d364101/pgp.shtml
next reply other threads:[~2001-07-20 21:32 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 4+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2001-07-20 21:32 Michael Totschnig [this message]
2001-07-20 21:47 ` Michael Totschnig
-- strict thread matches above, loose matches on Subject: below --
2001-07-20 21:27 Michael Totschnig
2001-07-22 17:58 ` Doug Alcorn
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