The Web Economy/15

Completion status: this resource is ~50% complete.

Resource type: this resource is a lesson.

Educational level: this is a tertiary (university) resource.

Levels of Participation

This is a lesson part of the module The Web Economy out of the Open Source ERP/Executive Diploma course conducted by a private university.

Topics

• There are different type of user participation in any online project.
• They are
  • Lurkers - who only reads and hardly said a word or contribute anything. They comprise a high percentage of visitors and contribute to the hitrate.
  • Trolls - who lurks but occasionaly fire up.
  • Newbies - who are new and would try to ask around and get what they want.
  • Geeks - those who are experts and may be busy or impatient to answer too many questions. But they are the most helpful in a forum or project
  • Poison - those who may divert the attention of a project with drawn out arguments or debates.
• Debian^[1] was a highly succesful project with 1,000 developers and faces issues^[2] giving rise to forks such as Ubuntu^[3].
• Information is free, people are not, contributors are priceless^[4].
  • Web Economy for FOSS is a new medium and paradigm that many do not know how to fit in. For example in the old economy, people hide or sell information. However here we cannot do that and regard information as free. We can only sell people's time as a service and it is charged in dollars for man-hours or man-days.
  • However there are those who still manipulate information such as delaying it unless the users pay and separate such users as to time phased consumers where those who pay shall get the information earlier.
  • The Web perpetually threatens information hiding as another party can or will expose earlier or easier infomation to forge ahead. Therefore any profiteering model has to rely on top of the rule that information must be free.

Assignment Tasks

• See if you can identify any such character in ADempiere SourceForge project.
• What are the reasons for even taking part in an FOSS project in the first place?^[5].
• Find out how best to convert lurkers to more active users.
• Investigate what is happening with Debian and its forks, and if there are more recent ideas on better community management.
• When you given free information in forums, sometimes users still bother your time privately and refuse to go through public forums. What should you do?

Activities

• Publish your works in an attractive manner in your user page, stating your own views and findings providing links to your sources. Use the talk page here to score marks.
• Create or edit sub-pages of course materials within wikiversity.
• Discuss in the forum (link shall be provided) by offering your ideas and answering or comment on others' postings.

References

1. ↑ http://www.openskill.info/infobox.php?ID=248
2. ↑ http://itmanagement.earthweb.com/features/article.php/12297_3765826_1
3. ↑ http://mako.cc/writing/to_fork_or_not_to_fork.html
4. ↑ http://www.adempiere.com/wiki/index.php/Information_Is_Free
5. ↑ http://freesoftware.mit.edu/papers/lakhaniwolf.pdf

Links to Student Notes

(Provided by Students - subject to edit ranking by tutor)

Notable Links to Resources

(Provided by Students - subject to edit ranking by tutor)

Sub-Pages

(Done in wikiversity as course material by the students under the guidance of the tutor)