Drupal as a Commons-Based Peer Production Community: A Sociological Perspective
Author: Rozas, David , david.rozas@gmail.com
Department: Sociology
University: University of Surrey, United Kingdom
Supervisor: Nigel Gilbert and Paul Hodkinson
Year of completion: In progress
Language of dissertation: English
Keywords:
Commons-Based Peer P
, Free/Libre Open Source
, Social innovation
, Drupal
Areas of Research:
Science and Technology
, Participation, Organizational Democracy and Self-Management
, Sociocybernetics
Abstract
Common-Based Peer Production (CBPP) is a new model of social innovation based on decentralized collaborative production. Drupal is a free software content management framework maintained and developed by a community of more than one million users, from which more than 30,000 of them have contributed code. It represents one of the most visible examples of this new model of socioeconomic production and its potential to develop complex products with an enormous number of interdependent components.
The main goal of the proposed research consists of analysing the Drupal community from a sociological perspective in order to extract insights related to the dynamics, group decision making procedures, motivations to contribute and mechanisms employed for the economic sustainability of this community. A triangulation of quantitative and qualitative methods is proposed to achieve this goal.
