[Python-Dev] looking for some people to talk with about Python development

[carmstr3 at illinois.edu]

Hello,
 
My name is Chandler Armstrong and I'm investigating environments of collaboration.  I'm a PhD candidate at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, specialized in internet research and science & technology studies.  I'm generally interested in development methods overall, and specifically interested in both artificial languange construction and evolution, and collaboration in open-source models.  I would like to talk to some members of the Python development community about what kinds of activities they do within it.  If anybody is interested in this please email me at carmstr3 at illinois.edu.  I will send you a document that describes the research and interview in more detail.  I'd like to do a voice interview over skype or a phone, but I can accomodate an online chat or even email.
 
I have some current research on this specific mailing list which is more quantitative in nature.   I downloaded the entire mailing list from the archives.  Next I looked through all the python-dev summaries and used links provided to referenced threads to indicate that a particular message or thread was meaningful in development.  I characterized the mailing list as threads, and each instance with about 30 attributes (things like the number of posts, the depth of the tree, a measure of 'branchyness' of the thread, the standard deviation of post counts across posters, the hour/day/month of the thread, etc).  Using these attributes I attempted to classify, using logistic regression, the threads that were indicated as meaningful in the python-dev summaries.  There are some significant results.  If anyone is interested I can send you my results, or even post them here to the list.  I'll be presenting my results at the Classification Society Conference at St. Louis in June.  The !
 wo!
rk is unpublished at the moment but I hope to find a journal for it this summer.
 
I used entirely Python for all that quantitative work: downloading the mailing list and going through all the summaries, opening the links and matching the referenced message to the correct one in my downloaded database, and cleaning and transforming data.  It was a ton of fun.  I hope to develop more scripts for other sorts of automated analysis.
 
At any rate, please contact me if you'de like to contribute to my current tack of investigation.  I would ultimately want to interview however many people that are willing to talk with me.  I need to do about two in the next couple of weeks, and I would get with other volunteers in the weeks after that.
 
Thanks,
Chandler Armstrong
carmstr3 at illinois.edu