The Social Structure of Open Source Development

HulkProtector1 writes "NewsForge has published an interview Tom Chance conducted with Andreas Brand, a sociologist who is studying the free software world. Read the full interview to learn more about Andreas' views on KDE's development model, volunteer recruitment and retention, motivation, work distribution and more. "

Comments

Re:While we're talking about the social structure.

[theGreater]

Did anyone here actually listen to or personally hear that speech or some of the followup interviews? The president of Harvard said something to the effect of, "There's different numbers of men and women in the sciences, and research should be done to see why: is it nature or nurture?"

Now, I don't know about you, but that sounds like a relatively innocent thing to say to me. I could see where you could misinterpret it... but it has sunk into the world's consciousness as a proven fact that the president of Harvard is a bigoted sexist jerk. This one incident simply doesn't seem to support that fact.

-theGreater Anti-PC.

Yale Daily News

Re:Who broke Slashdot?

[tcopeland]

I've seen this happen before; I think it's just a bot posting old comments to this store as an AC. And I bet his IP address will get blocked soon...

Re:While we're talking about the social structure.

[hellgate]

Links to follow-ups by Garry Becker (nobel prize in economics) and Richard Posner (judge on a United States Court of Appeals).

Obviously, they are not neurologists, but each has an interesting take.

Men use grey matter, women use white matter

[garyebickford]

According to this Press Release from University of California Irvine (also covered by many news media), men's and women's brains are more different than almost anybody thought. The difference may explain why women are generally better at tasks requiring so-called "relational intelligence" and men are generally better at tasks requiring single topic focus (math, engineering, etc.) Computer programming in general falls into the topical domain.

From the press release:

"In general, men have approximately 6.5 times the amount of gray matter related to general intelligence than women, and women have nearly 10 times the amount of white matter related to intelligence than men. Gray matter represents information processing centers in the brain, and white matter represents the networking of - or connections between - these processing centers.

This, according to Rex Jung, a UNM neuropsychologist and co-author of the study, may help to explain why men tend to excel in tasks requiring more local processing (like mathematics), while women tend to excel at integrating and assimilating information from distributed gray-matter regions in the brain, such as required for language facility. These two very different neurological pathways and activity centers, however, result in equivalent overall performance on broad measures of cognitive ability, such as those found on intelligence tests."

The press release also notes that these two processing models have similar intellectual performance. This is very interesting to me:

"These two very different neurological pathways and activity centers, however, result in equivalent overall performance on broad measures of cognitive ability, such as those found on intelligence tests."