Quick interview with any community members

[Nicholas Mc Guire]

On Tue, Oct 30, 2018 at 05:34:38PM -0400, Alex Frederiksen wrote:
> Hey guys.
> 
> I decided to do a college paper on the Linux discourse community,
> particularly on how a person navigates between groups and gains "authority"
> within the community. If ya guys could answer some of my questions, that
> would be real swell and I'd appreciate it. (:
> 
> 1. Would you consider yourself closer to a "novice" or an "expert" in the
> community?
> 2. How do "novices" and "experts" interact?
> 3. What would you say is the primary way(s) of communication?
> 4. Are there ways to attain authority (as a maintainer or leader of sorts)?
> If so, how?
> 5. What are some of the common goals of the community?
>
Nice try but any literature on sociology-statistics basics - look
up voluntary response, undercoverage and unknown non-responders -
will tell you that you can not do that - you will not get
a representative sample this way - the only way you can do this
in a sound way is to take a list of kernel contributors
e.g.
 
git clone git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git
cd linux-stable
git log --pretty=format:"%an %ae" | sort -bf | uniq -i > list_of_contributors

which will give you a list of author names and author emails
(with some duplicates due to changing email or name typos - so those
will need manual checking) and then do a clean random sample on that 
"population" sending them a request to answer your questions - and 
don´t forget to factor in the non-responders !
 
thx!
hofrat