[Bigbang-dev] research questions of interest for standard-setting participation

[Nick Doty]

I've asked around among a few standards folks about what they would be interested to learn about the demographics or patterns of participation that we might be able to understand from mailing lists. Here is a list of potential questions. I've framed these as IETF questions, but I think they could similarly apply to other standard-setting organizations (W3C, say), and maybe in some form to other online communities.

* how many participants total in IETF work?
* how "sticky" is participation?
	if people participate on a list, do they return? do they show up to f2f meetings?
	what's the attrition rate?
	what's the distribution of length of participation?
* who has participated longest? across the most groups?
	is there a group of "elites" across working groups?
	how many participants are single-group?
	how many groups does the typical participant join?

As I believe I've mentioned to this group before, I've been looking into estimating gender in mailing list participation, including:

* What is the gender distribution of participants in Internet and Web technical standard-setting?
    how does that distribution differ from the population at large? from employment at related firms?
    does that distribution change over time?
    are there sub-groups which have distinctly different distributions?
* Does the gender distribution of conversation differ from the gender distribution of the participants?

Do you have questions you'd like to add to this list? Would you be interested in trying to measure/answer one of these questions? Which are the easiest and which are the most difficult? What features would we need to add to BigBang to make them answerable?

Let me know, I'd love to dive in deeper to some of these questions with collaborators.

Cheers,
Nick
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