Mario Fux

… I finally got my diploma for a study that took much longer than I first thought ;-). But then with the knife at my throat (the old study model ran out and thus it was my last chance to finish) and great support of friends and family I found the time and energy to successfully finish and get my Master’s degree. The title of my diploma thesis was “Media Choice and the Media-Synchronicity-Theory – Development of an Instrument for the Study of selected Elements of MST for Free Software Communities” and here you find its English abstract:

This paper will analyse the media choice and media usage of Free Software communities and hence to draw conclusions for a more successful deployment of Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) in the area of education and school. After a history of ten years of CSCL in action, relevant failures and possible causes, we develop a questionnaire on the foundation of the Theory of Media Synchronicity from Dennis et al. (2008). The acertained data will be evaluated regarding the daily media usage on the one hand and the media choice in specific situations on the other hand. Additionally we are going to compare the data with the data of the study of Miller (2014) about "learning strategies and new media".
To validate the ideas of a more successful deployment of CSCL two concrete hypotheses will be established: 1. the characteristics in media usage und choice in Free Software communities and the preferred choice of asynchronous media when being longer within the community, and 2. the importance of email as communication media in these communities. The acertained data and its evaluation do not confirm the first hypothesis. But there are lots of results that confirm the second hypothesis.

Unfortunately this is the only English part of the diploma thesis besides the questionnaire. With this questionnaire I collected some data through a survey. Thanks everybody for participating in this survey and yesterday I finally informed the two lucky winners about their prices.

A paper that might be more interesting for you is the one about “KDE as an example of a Free Software community” from a social-educational perspective. In the appendix you find 9 longish IRC interviews with different people from the KDE community. There you might find some interesting insights and different perspectives.

PS: Oh and one of my sons has his birthday today so: Happy birthday little b.

I’d like to quote Maximiliano Curia’s email here:

Hi all!

For quite a while now the KDE team has been severely understaffed. We maintain
a lot of packages, with many different kinds of bugs, but we don’t have enough
people to do all the work that needs to be done. We have tools that help us
automate the update to new upstream releases, but that’s just the tip of the
iceberg of our work and so we are writing to invite more people to get
involved in the team and help us get KDE software in Debian into better shape.

Some of the tasks that we need help with are:

+ Bug triaging: there are many many bugs in the BTS. We need people that go
through them, understand the problem and how to reproduce it, confirm
that they are still present in the latest versions. In particular, there
are bugs affecting the version in wheezy, and we need people to go through
those as well.

+ Bug forwarding: we are so understaffed that we have been asking users to
forward the bugs upstream themselves. Some users do this, but some don’t.
It would help us a lot to have people in the team in charge of this.

+ Patch forwarding: we have quite a bunch of patches applied in the Debian
packages that should be applied upstream. Some need to be generalized
instead of being Debian-specific. This work would save us time in the
future, so it’s very important to get it done.

+ Upgrade-testing: in the past, the upgrade from one Debian stable to the
other has been quite traumatic for KDE software users. We need people to
try upgrading from wheezy to jessie and report any bugs that they might
encounter so that we can fix them ahead of the release.

+ Creating patches: many of the bugs that we have require writing patches,
some are easy and some are harder, but any help here would be really
appreciated.

+ Packaging other KDE apps: we have packages for the core components of KDE
software, but there are many other useful components that still need to
get packaged.

+ Updating our welcoming wiki page [1], adding these tasks and any future
tasks, and unifying the todo lists [2].

If you are interested in helping with any of these, please join our irc
channel #debian-qt-kde in irc.oftc.net, or our mailing list [3]. We are happy
to help you get started.

[1]: https://wiki.debian.org/PkgKde
[2]: https://wiki.debian.org/KDETodo
https://wiki.debian.org/KdeDebTasks
http://pkg-kde.alioth.debian.org/todo.html
gobby://gobby.debian.org/Teams/KDE/TODO
[3]: https://lists.debian.org/debian-qt-kde/