Summary of scientific research on Debian (was: DD age histogram)

[Michael Hanke <mih@debian.org>]

Hi,

On Wed, Jul 13, 2011 at 04:56:16PM +0200, Stefano Zacchiroli wrote:
> That's great, thanks for doing and sharing it. I agree with you that
> it's way more than just a fun hack, but it can be a useful tool to
> understand how the DD community evolves and related figures (e.g. the
> correlation among age periods and the amount of volunteer time can have
> a lot to say on able people power in Debian).

That made me wonder whether Debian collects references to the research
done on it somehow somewhere. I know that some DDs have graduated
writing thesis on several aspects of Debian, but I couldn't find a place
on Debian's websites that documents this.

Google scholar offers an initial guess:

  http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=debian&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&hl=en&tab=ws

but it mixes "howto"-style documents with actual studies on Debian, like
this one:

  http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1247454

I find the social and technical dynamics of Debian fascinating -- I'm
sure I'm not alone. By exposing prior research on the project more
prominently we might be able to encourage further research and maybe
learn something from it.

Michael

-- 
Michael Hanke
http://mih.voxindeserto.de