Nico Earnshaw has completed a thesis on the Samba community as part of his Bachelor of Arts Informatics degree at the University of Sydney. The work is a very fine study of the practices of members of the community, with particular attention paid to Samba Team developers (their motivations, goals, practices, etc.). The general question explored seems to be, how does being a part of the Samba community define a developer?

This research is an exploratory study into the constitution of identity in the Samba community. The results presented are based upon an analysis of documents, websites, internet-relay-chat (IRC), mailing lists, private correspondence and face-to-face interviews. The primary method of data collection was the semi-structured interview method.

The paper also draws on other research/writings on OSS communities, but the observations specific to Samba development and the Samba community are unique to this work. There are lots of nice quotes from Samba Team members, too. Nicely done, Nico.

To read the complete thesis, see The Samba Project: Transformation of Self through Open Source Software Development.