An empirically-based characterization and quantification of information seeking through mailing lists during Open Source developers' software evolution

The findings provide insights for those interested in supporting the information needs of OS developer communities: They suggest that the tools and techniques developed in support of co-located developers should be largely mirrored for these communities: that they should be implementation centric, and directed at illustrating “how” the system achieves its functional goals and states. Likewise they should be directed at determining the reason for system bugs: a type of question frequently posed by OS developers but less frequently responded to.