CoCoMo

CoCoMo stands for ’Community Collaboration Monitoring’, i.e. the investigation of ’open collaboration communities’ enabled by the Internet on an unlimited scale and which today covers a large number of economic needs involving high quality products.

The innovative character of our project is the utilization of relevant research results from several disciplines (social sciences, economics, physics) to provide a computer-aided analysis of the fundamental features of open collaboration communities. Our aim is not only to increase our understanding of this important production process (’socio-technical organization’), but also to provide enterprises, which want to take advantage of this process, with an instrument with which they can assess the state of collaboration communities in an objective manner, for example their maturity and efficiency. Small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) can especially profit from this instrument, as they are increasingly dependent on ’Open Source’ products and their producing communities, and because they generally have no resources available for the monitoring and assessment of these processes.

This analysis is made possible by the fact that all information about the activities and members of open collaboration communities is publicly available (email archives, source code management systems, bug/issue trackers), which makes an automatic monitoring and evaluation feasible and allows us to infer and quantify important (non-trivial) parameters about the structure and evolution of collaboration communities, such as social cohesion, division of labour, continuity and incentives.

An increased understanding of the so called ’Architecture of Participation’, especially that of successful communities, is a precondition for effective support and consultation of enterprises in questions related to active or passive participation in this knowledge-intensive production process.

• Empirical investigation of measures to assess qualitative properties of this relationship
• Theoretical investigation of hypothesized feed-back loops between both structures.