Hello all. I am an undergraduate anthropology student doing research for my dissertation on the F/OSS community. In this thread, I'd really like to hear from some people who have contributed code before, to learn more about how contributors communicate and organise and hopefully to hear about some of your own experiences.
The sort of things I'm interested in are forking (What sort of thing causes/averts a fork? Have you ever participated in one?), the process of decision making (Is consensus democracy effective? Where do communication structures often break down?) and any other reflections or thoughts that you think are relevant. I have been reading Producing OSS by Karl Fogel (http://producingoss.com/producingoss.pdf), which I think has given me a good overall idea of the process, but I would really love to hear some more personal accounts.
I must admit that I am a little worried that I may be asking questions that are too sensitive for a public forum. If this is the case, please let me know and I will correct my posting in future.

Jack Kavanagh
Anthropology undergraduate
University of East London

there may be better places to ask this question
like the programming sub-forum
or mailing lists for large projects
you could also email maintainers of some projects

you could even go bug hunting
or do some alpha testing and be part of the process
to get some first hand experience

One account here:

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...ftware-870736/

Thanks for the suggestions Rob, that's good advice.
Thank you also for the link Dugan, that was a good example, which caused me to rethink my understanding of something. It seems that alot of code gets written for the same reason, a programmer notices that something doesn't work or maybe doesn't exist yet and then takes it upon themself to fix the problem, whether by assembling a group or simply writing it on their own. I find that very admirable and it explains alot as to why people are attracted to OSS I think, the capacity to create their own solutions. What do you think?