There’s sometimes vaguely humorous threads on how you can improve a given comic strip by appending “… in the dark!” or something similar to the final panel. You can get that kind of stuff at the Comics Curmudgeon. But I was reminded of it by today’s sequence of my blog titles which are all of the form “<FSPOOS> on <FSOPOOS>” where FSPOOS stands for “Free Software project or operating system.”

Let’s carry on in that vein. Did you know there was a research room at this year’s FOSDEM, where (European) researchers who work on studying Free Software got together to talk over their research findings? It’s too bad not many of them escaped from the research room, though. Paul Adams did, and he spent most of the weekend at the KDE stand getting started on KDE hacking. he says lots of the researchers got out and integrated with the community, but I can’t say I spotted that many.

Zbigniew (IRC nick “gandalf” because he claims that’s easier to pronounce) stopped by with some sociological questions. Although there have been many studies of motivation on OSS developers in the past, this one looks beyond just the coders and includes contributors in a general sense. There are some rendering issues in his survey with konqueror, but it’s worth filling out.

I always time surveys to check the accuracy of the “this will take only ten minutes” claims, and this survey too me from 14:41:36 to 14:53:37 including a distraction about labcoats on the #kde-research IRC channel. So ten minutes seems fairly accurate. There are a lot of questions though.

As for #kde-research, that’s the IRC channel on Freenode where the people who do research on KDE or use KDE in their research or who are KDE folk who are also researchers hang out. There’s labcoats for everybody.

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