Charles Schweik, associate professor of environmental conservation and public policy, has received confirmation from the National Science Foundation that it will fund a doctoral consortium on open source software research that he is organizing. The consortium will be held on October 5, 2011, in Salvador Brazil prior to the 7th International Conference on Open Source Systems. The grant will fund eight U.S. doctoral students to attend the consortium and the OSS 2011 conference.
Over the past decade, the Open Source Software (OSS) phenomenon has had a global impact on the way organizations and individuals create, distribute, acquire and use software and software-based services. OSS has challenged the conventional wisdom of the software engineering and software business communities, has been instrumental for educators and researchers, and has become an important aspect of e-government and information society initiatives. OSS is a complex phenomenon and requires a interdisciplinary understanding of its engineering, technical, economic, legal and socio-cultural dynamics.
The goal of the doctoral consortium is to provide PhD students with an environment in which they can share and discuss their goals, methods and results of their research, and get advice and reactions from others before their dissertations are completed. For more information about the conference, visit http://ossconf.org/.