Community source development: an emerging model with new opportunities

  • Authors:
  • Dawn Ressel Nidy;Fong Kwok

  • Affiliations:
  • DePaul University, Chicago, IL;DePaul University, Chicago, IL

  • Venue:
  • CHI '05 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems
  • Year:
  • 2005

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Abstract

This paper focuses on an emerging model for software development in higher education: community source. Community source seeks to blend aspects of both open source and traditional development processes. Volunteers join at the institutional level and share resources and ideas to develop applications for common needs. The code remains open, but the collaboration exists in a meritocracy; those who contribute the most have the most influence on the outcome. While many in the HCI community have long abandoned the prospect of affecting change in open source development, average computer users, rather than developers, are becoming the main audience. As open source matures and community source emerges, some new opportunities are presenting themselves. They require a dialogue within our profession to yield new processes and vocabularies that work within the open source framework.