Travel Support for the Open Source Systems 2016 Doctoral Consortium

Syracuse University, Syracuse NY

Investigators

Abstract

This funding will support attendance by approximately 4 promising graduate students from U.S. institutions of higher learning at a doctoral consortium (workshop) to be co-located with the 12th International Conference on Open Source Systems, May 30 through June 2, 2016, in Gothenburg, Sweden. Students will be selected through a competitive open call, with attention paid to developing a diverse group of attendees. Students in the consortium will have a day of focused discussion of their research topics with other students and distinguished research faculty as mentors, followed by attendance at the conference to further deepen their engagement with current research and active researchers. The last two decades have witnessed a tremendous growth in the interest and diffusion of Free/libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS) technologies, which has changed the way organizations and individuals create, acquire and distribute software and software-based services. This doctoral consortium will provide feedback to students in order to develop higher quality and more relevant research on the FLOSS phenomenon. It is often the case that only one or a few students in any particular university department will have FLOSS as a research topic, which diminishes the opportunities for these students to interact with others sharing a similar research focus. A focused doctoral consortium can be extremely beneficial to such students trying to develop and refine their dissertation research ideas. A longer-term expected benefit is the development of intellectual connections that will improve the disciplinary research that forms the students' theses, and also provide a network to support future interdisciplinary research projects.