Hello everybody!
My name is Roman Högg (RomanH) and I have occasionally posted to this mailing list and the web site forum in the past for a variety of reasons. (offering/asking for help, submitting the Swiss German keyboard layout, etc.) I now contact you for something completely different.
Together with the Helsinki School of Economics, Luleå University of Technology, Nokia and IBM Business Services, our institute ( http://www.mcm.unisg.ch ) is conducting a study called "Collabora-tion4Innovation (C4I)". The study is funded by the European Commission and is examining the im-pact of diversity within teams on factors such as innovation, creativity and productivity. By diversity we mean things like cultural diversity, different skills, different educational backgrounds, etc.
In the first phase of the project we are currently conducting a number of case studies from a variety of areas. The goal is to find the "state of the art" and later define areas in which further research is needed (e.g. organisational aspects such as process design, improving collaboration technologies, etc.) Since ReactOS is - as far as I can see - developed by a pretty diverse set of people (developers from different countries, probably with different skills and non-developers/users/testers that try to improve the software in whatever way they can) I wanted to ask whether it would be possible to conduct a "Reac-tOS Case Study". I think it would be nice to not only have companies in the case studies. If you agree to this idea, I would like to conduct interviews with 2-3 persons of you (in English or German, most likely via phone). Each interview would last between 45 minutes and 1,5h maximum. (or I could send the questionnaire/interview guide in advance and we would only discuss the more open questions over the phone). After the interviews I would condense everything into a 3-4 page description of the project and the aspect of diversity. You would then get that text and could tell me whether you agree with it or whether I would have to change things. Nothing will be published without your consent! Unfortunately I can't offer you any money for the collaboration, but I think the study will give the project some additional promotion and, if you want to, you may of course use my text for documenta-tion purposes.
Please let me know what you think and thank you very much!!!
kind regards
Roman
------------------------------------------ Roman Högg Research Assistant
=mcm institute for Media and Communications Management University of St. Gallen, Switzerland Blumenbergplatz 9, 9000 St. Gallen Phone +41 (0)71 224 34 39 Mobile +41 (0)79 418 59 13 e-mail roman.hoegg@unisg.ch http://www.mcm.unisg.ch http://www.alexandria.unisg.ch/Personen/Roman_Hoegg