Hello,
 
My name is Chandler Armstrong and I'm investigating environments of 
collaboration.  I'm a PhD candidate at the University of Illinois, 
Urbana-Champaign, specialized in internet research and science & technology 
studies.  I'm generally interested in development methods overall, and 
specifically interested in both artificial languange construction and 
evolution, and collaboration in open-source models.  I would like to talk to 
some members of the Python development community about what kinds of activities 
they do within it.  If anybody is interested in this please email me at 
carms...@illinois.edu.  I will send you a document that describes the research 
and interview in more detail.  I'd like to do a voice interview over skype or a 
phone, but I can accomodate an online chat or even email.
 
I have some current research on this specific mailing list which is more 
quantitative in nature.   I downloaded the entire mailing list from the 
archives.  Next I looked through all the python-dev summaries and used links 
provided to referenced threads to indicate that a particular message or thread 
was meaningful in development.  I characterized the mailing list as threads, 
and each instance with about 30 attributes (things like the number of posts, 
the depth of the tree, a measure of 'branchyness' of the thread, the standard 
deviation of post counts across posters, the hour/day/month of the thread, 
etc).  Using these attributes I attempted to classify, using logistic 
regression, the threads that were indicated as meaningful in the python-dev 
summaries.  There are some significant results.  If anyone is interested I can 
send you my results, or even post them here to the list.  I'll be presenting my 
results at the Classification Society Conference at St. Louis in June.  The !
 wo!
rk is unpublished at the moment but I hope to find a journal for it this summer.
 
I used entirely Python for all that quantitative work: downloading the mailing 
list and going through all the summaries, opening the links and matching the 
referenced message to the correct one in my downloaded database, and cleaning 
and transforming data.  It was a ton of fun.  I hope to develop more scripts 
for other sorts of automated analysis.
 
At any rate, please contact me if you'de like to contribute to my current tack 
of investigation.  I would ultimately want to interview however many people 
that are willing to talk with me.  I need to do about two in the next couple of 
weeks, and I would get with other volunteers in the weeks after that.
 
Thanks,
Chandler Armstrong
carms...@illinois.edu
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