Envisioning National and International Research on the Multidisciplinary Empirical Science of Free/Open Source Software

We seek to establish and sustain an agenda for a national program for research on free/open source software (FOSS, or sometimes FLOSS) by academic and industrial researchers in different disciplines. This proposal describes our vision for such a research agenda, along with the international workshop and supporting meetings we propose to conduct in order to develop the agenda to guide future research. The activities build from recent research meetings on FOSS support multi-disciplinary studies of FOSS development. We also identify our goals, assessment method, activities, outcomes, and results from recent meetings giving rise to this proposal.