Rozas, David
(2018).
Drupal Planet links archive, 29-05-2013 - 23-11-2016.
[Data Collection]. Colchester, Essex:
UK Data Archive.
10.5255/UKDA-SN-852904
Commons-Based Peer Production (CBPP) is a new model of socio-economic production in which groups of individuals cooperate with each other without a traditional hierarchical organisation to produce common and public goods, such as Wikipedia or GNU/Linux. There is a need to understand how these communities govern and organise themselves as they grow in size and complexity. Following an ethnographic approach, this thesis explores the emergence of and changes in the organisational structures and processes of Drupal: a large and global CBBP community which, over the past fifteen years, has coordinated the work of hundreds of thousands of participants to develop a technology which currently powers more than 2% of websites worldwide.
Firstly, this thesis questions and studies the notion of contribution in CBPP communities, arguing that contribution should be understood as a set of meanings which are under constant negotiation between the participants according to their own internal logics of value. Following a constructivist approach, it shows the relevance played by less visible contribution activities such as the organisation of events.
Secondly, this thesis explores the emergence and inner workings of the socio-technical systems which surround contributions related to the development of projects and the organisation of events. Two intertwined organisational dynamics were identified: formalisation in the organisational processes and decentralisation in decision-making.
Finally, this thesis brings together the empirical data from this exploration of socio-technical systems with previous literature on self-organisation and organisation studies, to offer an account of how the organisational changes resulted in the emergence of a polycentric model of governance, in which different forms of organisation varying in their degree of organicity co-exist and influence each other.
Data description (abstract)
Database of links to posts published under Drupal Planet, a popular RSS feed within the Drupal community, whose contents are curated by Drupalistas according to certain guidelines. The database excludes press releases, job announcements and technical posts with little content relevant to Drupal. This archive has been designed for researching purposes for the PhD thesis: "Drupal as a Commons-Based Peer Production community: an ethnographic perspective".
Since posts at Drupal Planet are only retained for 16 weeks, a set of software scripts was developed to collect and archive links to posts automatically from 29 May 2013 to 23 November 2016. This yielded an archive of 8,613 documents for documentary analysis as part of the relevant to the PhD study.
Data creators: |
Creator Name |
Affiliation |
ORCID (as URL) |
Rozas David |
University of Surrey |
|
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Sponsors: |
P2Pvalue, European Comission
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Grant reference: |
FP7-ICT-2013-10 610961
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Topic classification: |
Science and technology Economics
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Keywords: |
peer production, collaborative economy, open source community, free software community
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Project title: |
Self-organisation in Commons-Based Peer Production. Drupal: “the drop is always moving”
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Project dates: |
From | To |
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1 October 2013 | 1 October 2016 |
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Date published: |
07 Jun 2018 18:54
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Last modified: |
07 Jun 2018 18:54
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Temporal coverage: |
From | To |
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29 May 2013 | 23 November 2016 |
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Country: |
World Wide |
Data collection method: |
Two data collection strategies were employed: (1) A PHP script which periodically includes the new posts from Drupal Planet. This script was first run on 30/12/2014. From that date (including the previous 30 posts), the list should be exhaustive as far as no errors might have provoked the server to go down. (2) A Python script to recover the blog posts fetched via the RSS reader of Thunderbird. The source were a set of .eml files parsed and included into the database. These came from several machines and were merged. However, some of the blog posts might not have been gathered (e.g.: if the e-mail client was not run for a while). Therefore, the list regarding the previous period might not be so exhaustive and some of the posts might have gotten lost.
The online version of the archive (see Related resources) continues to add further links; currently numbering 11,724 post links.
The source code of the scripts is available on GitHub under a GPLv3 license. CSS adapted from captain Anonymous.
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Observation unit: |
Other |
Kind of data: |
Text |
Type of data: |
Qualitative and mixed methods data |
Resource language: |
English |
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Data sourcing, processing and preparation: |
The file is presented as a CSV including:
- ID (hash value);
- Source (Drupal Planet RSS);
- URL title;
- URL date (date of the post according to the metadata from the RSS);
- Fetch date (date in which this data was collected by the script).
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Rights owners: |
Name |
Affiliation |
ORCID (as URL) |
Rozas David |
University of Surrey |
|
|
Contact: |
Name | Email | Affiliation | ORCID (as URL) |
---|
Rozas, David | drozas@surrey.ac.uk | University of Surrey | Unspecified |
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Notes on access: |
The Data Collection is available to any user without the requirement for registration for download/access.
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Publisher: |
UK Data Archive
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Last modified: |
07 Jun 2018 18:54
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