Kaylea Champion is a PhD Candidate in Communication at University of Washington. She studies how people cooperate to build public goods like GNU/Linux and Wikipedia, including what gets built and maintained -- and what doesn't. Prior to graduate school, she worked in IT as a consultant, system administrator and project manager. She holds an MS in Computer Science from the University of Chicago. A GNU/Linux user since 1994, she enjoys tromping through the woods, smashing goblins, and cooking for a crowd.
Accepted Talks:
Detecting At-Risk Projects in Debian
Debian maintainers work hard to produce quality packages – but some widely-used projects may be quietly falling behind over time. In this talk, I’ll describe my research to measure ‘underproduction’ in Debian: packages that are relatively low quality given their popularity. These underproduced packages are a source of software infrastructure risk.
This talk is accessible to end-users as well as maintainers and developers. You’ll walk away from the session with both my concrete results describing troubled packages and a way of thinking about at-risk software that you can apply to your own environment.
After the talk, let’s discuss your ideas about the possible sources and solutions to the challenges of underproduction.
Calling All FLOSS Founders
Have you (or a group of friends) started a free software project? How about a usergroup or conference? Maybe you haven’t yet, but are definitely considering it. Or, have you tried to start something new and found it didn’t work out the way you wanted? Have you witnessed the rise and decline of projects and events, and are you willing to share your stories? Come to the FLOSS Founders BoF and discuss your experience!
Alright, so this isn’t just a meet and greet. Two researchers from the University of Washington studying founder decisions would like to reach out to the source to learn what works and what doesn’t. We’ll both be at DebConf this year and are interested in gaining perspective from people who are willing to participate in a group discussion, sharing their thoughts about the process behind how FLOSS things are founded, and how that foundation may in turn influence their development and sustainability.
Hope to see you there!