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