Cooperation and Social Status in Free and Open Source Projects

I will talk about my master thesis about the Debian project. For my thesis I gathered an extensive dataset about all sorts of Debian developement activities (mailinglist, bug reports, uploads, ...). I used this dataset first for some descriptive analysis of the project activity. I studied the growth of the project over time, the distribution of the workload among developers, the impact of releases on project activity, the impact of the creation of Ubuntu on various aspects of project activity and the distribution of the work done on Debian over weekdays and hours of the day. In a second part I verified the hypothesis that reputation and status attained through work done for the project "pays-off". Bug reports submitted by high-status contributors are fixed significantly faster and with a higher probability.