Open Source Software (OSS) development challenges traditional software engineering practices. In particular, OSS projects are managed by a large number of volunteers, working freely on the tasks they choose to undertake. OSS projects also rarely rely on explicit system-level design, or on project plans or schedules. Moreover, OSS developers work in arbitrary locations and collaborate almost exclusively over the Internet, using simple tools such as email and software code tracking databases (e.g. CVS).All the characteristics above make OSS development akin to weaving a tapestry of heterogeneous components. The OSS design process relies on various types of actors: people with prescribed roles, but also elements coming from a variety of information spaces (such as email and software code). The objective of our research is to understand the specific hybrid weaving accomplished by the actors of this distributed, collective design process. This, in turn, challenges traditional methodologies used to understand distributed software engineering: OSS development is simply too ''fibrous'' to lend itself well to analysis under a single methodological lens.In this paper, we describe the methodological framework we articulated to analyze collaborative design in the Open Source world. Our framework focuses on the links between the heterogeneous components of a project's hybrid network. We combine ethnography, text mining, and socio-technical network analysis and visualization to understand OSS development in its totality. This way, we are able to simultaneously consider the social, technical, and cognitive aspects of OSS development. We describe our methodology in detail, and discuss its implications for future research on distributed collective practices.

This paper is an analysis of online discussions in an Open Source Software (OSS) design community, the Python project. Developers of Python are geographically distributed and work online asynchronously. The objective of our study is to understand and to model the dynamics of the OSS design process that takes place in mailing list exchanges. We develop a method to study distant and asynchronous collaborative design activity based on an analysis of quoting practices. We analyze and visualize three aspects of the online dynamics: social, thematic temporal, and design. We show that roles emerge during discussions according to the involvement and the position of the participants in the discussions and how they influence participation in the design discussions. In our analysis of the thematic temporal dynamics of discussion, we examine how themes of discussion emerge, diverge, and are refined over time. To understand the design dynamics, we perform a content analysis of messages exchanged between developers to reveal how the online discussions reflect the ''work flow'' of the project: it provides us with a picture of the collaborative design process in the OSS community. These combined results clarify how knowledge and artefacts are elaborated in this epistemic, exploration-oriented, OSS community. Finally, we outline the need to automate of our method to extend our results. The proposed automation could have implications for both researchers and participants in OSS communities.

The aim of this research is to analyse how design and use are mediated in Open Source Software (OSS) design. Focusing on the Python community, our study examines a ''pushed-by-users'' design proposal through the discussions occurring in two mailing-lists: one, useroriented and the other, developer-oriented. To characterize the links between users and developers, we investigate the activities and references (knowledge sharing) performed by the contributors to these two mailing-lists. We found that the participation of users remains local to their community. However, several key participants act as boundary spanners between the user and the developer communities. This emerging role is characterized by cross-participation in parallel same-topic discussions in both mailing-lists, cohesion between crossparticipants, the occupation of a central position in the social network linking users and developers, as well as active, distinctive and adapted contributions. The user championing the proposal acts as a key boundary spanner coordinating the process and using explicit linking strategies. We argue that OSS design may be considered as a form of ''role emerging design'', i.e. design organized and pushed through emerging roles and through a balance between these roles. The OSS communities seem to provide a suitable socio-technical environment to enable such role emergence. r