Abstract : With the increasing prominence of open collaboration as found in free/libre/open source software projects and other joint production communities, potential participants need to acquire skills. How these skills are learned has received little research attention. This article presents a large-scale survey (5,309 valid responses) in which users and developers of the beta release of a popular file download application were asked which learning styles were used to acquire technical and social skills. We find that the extent to which a person acquired the relevant skills through informal methods tends to be higher if the person is a free/libre/open source code contributor, while being a professional software developer does not have this effect. Additionally, younger participants proved more likely to make use of formal methods of learning. These insights will help individuals, commercial companies, educational institutions, governments and open collaborative projects decide how they promote learning.
Ernesto Damiani; Fulvio Frati; Dirk Riehle; Anthony I. Wasserman. 11th International Conference on Open Source Systems (OSS), May 2015, Florence, Italy. IFIP Advances in Information and Communication Technology, AICT-451, pp.23-32, 2015, Open Source Systems: Adoption and Impact. 〈10.1007/978-3-319-17837-0_3〉
https://hal.inria.fr/hal-01320157
Contributeur : Hal Ifip
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Soumis le : lundi 23 mai 2016 - 14:58:29
Dernière modification le : vendredi 9 février 2018 - 09:22:02
Ann Barcomb, Michael Grottke, Jan-Philipp Stauffert, Dirk Riehle, Sabrina Jahn. How Developers Acquire FLOSS Skills. Ernesto Damiani; Fulvio Frati; Dirk Riehle; Anthony I. Wasserman. 11th International Conference on Open Source Systems (OSS), May 2015, Florence, Italy. IFIP Advances in Information and Communication Technology, AICT-451, pp.23-32, 2015, Open Source Systems: Adoption and Impact. 〈10.1007/978-3-319-17837-0_3〉. 〈hal-01320157〉
