Understanding the nature of collaboration in open-source software development

Our approach to better understand the nature of collaboration in open-source software (OSS) development is to view it as a participative system, where people and artifacts are inter-connected via a computational infrastructure demonstrating a socio-technical system. This paper presents a framework we have developed to describe a participative system, and discusses our hypothesis that the framework is capable of characterizing the evolution of an OSS community through changing the participants´ perceived value and types of engagement. We report a preliminary result of our case study on the GIMP development mailing list as an initial step to test this hypothesis.