Study title

Database of links to posts published under Drupal Planet, a popular RSS feed within the Drupal community, whose contents are curated by Drupalistas according to certain guidelines. The database excludes press releases, job announcements and technical posts with little content relevant to Drupal. This archive has been designed for researching purposes for the PhD thesis: "Drupal as a Commons-Based Peer Production community: an ethnographic perspective". Since posts at Drupal Planet are only retained for 16 weeks, a set of software scripts was developed to collect and archive links to posts automatically from 29 May 2013 to 23 November 2016. This yielded an archive of 8,613 documents for documentary analysis as part of the relevant to the PhD study. Commons-Based Peer Production (CBPP) is a new model of socio-economic production in which groups of individuals cooperate with each other without a traditional hierarchical organisation to produce common and public goods, such as Wikipedia or GNU/Linux. There is a need to understand how these communities govern and organise themselves as they grow in size and complexity. Following an ethnographic approach, this thesis explores the emergence of and changes in the organisational structures and processes of Drupal: a large and global CBBP community which, over the past fifteen years, has coordinated the work of hundreds of thousands of participants to develop a technology which currently powers more than 2% of websites worldwide. Firstly, this thesis questions and studies the notion of contribution in CBPP communities, arguing that contribution should be understood as a set of meanings which are under constant negotiation between the participants according to their own internal logics of value. Following a constructivist approach, it shows the relevance played by less visible contribution activities such as the organisation of events. Secondly, this thesis explores the emergence and inner workings of the socio-technical...