[TOS] Bachelor thesis, interview subjects.

[Mel Chua]

> With this study we hope to verify existing research regarding the
> importance of trust within these kind of projects, and further speculate
> on the impacts it may have. We are also curious to how trust occur
> naturally within online projects.

In addition to new interviews, you might also be able to draw on 
existing research and datasets to tie your thesis into the network of 
people already exploring this space. (You're probably already doing this.)

https://www.google.com/search?&q=open+source+trust+community yields some 
interesting results, especially the first three:

* http://works.bepress.com/michael_lane/10/ ("Trust in Virtual 
Communities involved in Free/Open Source Projects: An Empirical Study")

* 
http://www.mendeley.com/catalog/trust-community-open-source-software-production/ 
-- ("Trust and Community in Open Source Software Production" plus the 
"Related Papers" immediately below it)

* Both examples above are scholarly papers. Other sources would include 
social network analysis (Seb Benthall, who is on this list, may have 
more thoughts about it) and writings on the economics of open source by 
folks like Eric Von Hippel. Mako Hill has a nice collection of papers at 
http://acawiki.org/User:Benjamin_Mako_Hill/Generals -- not all will be 
relevant to your thesis, but there's good stuff there. The 
dissertations/theses of Biella Coleman, Martin Krafft, and Andreas Lloyd 
are all anthropology studies of open communties, and discuss trust at 
some point along the line (although it's not the main thrust of their 
argument).

* Individual contributors also write about trust a fair amount, which 
you can use in addition to (or in place of) interviews since they are a 
preexisting open dataset. An example is 
http://www.sutor.com/c/2011/03/open-source-communities-trust-vs-control/ 
-- if you watch the Planet feeds of major projects you're likely to find 
posts mentioning trust occasionally (examples: 
http://planet.mozilla.org/, http://planet.gnome.org/, 
http://planet.fedoraproject.org/ -- google "Planet <name of open source 
project you are interested in>" for more).

Finally -- from one qualitative researcher on open source to another -- 
watch out for your own biases when you're writing your questions and 
conducting your interviews. Even if you think open source is awesome and 
that trust relationships function a certain way within them, try to 
disconfirm your hypothesis, and check your questions to see if they're 
leading ones. (Think about the difference in responses you'll get to "is 
trust important in your open source interactions? why or why not?" 
versus "think about a person in the open source world you've never met 
in person, but have worked with and feel like you've gotten to know 
pretty well, and tell me the story of how you started collaborating and 
getting to know them" and then going through and coding that transcript 
for elements that indicate trust or trust-building).

Disclaimer: don't take what I'm saying as gospel -- there are tons of 
approaches to qualitative research, and I'm very much a student in this 
realm myself. I'm trying to encourage you, via this email, to think 
outside the obvious, generate rich data, sit and rummage around in it, 
and reflect and re-reflect on what you're finding about trust (a huge, 
deep, broad issue and a big word that can mean a million things) instead 
of doing what amounts to a quantitative analysis on quantitative data 
("3 out of 5 participants mentioned 'trust' as a factor, therefore trust 
is a factor").

Looking forward to seeing what you discover. Please share your final 
paper back with this list when you're done!

--Mel