Data and analyses sharing to support research on free/libre open source software

Be it resolved, that the FLOSS research community requires that data and analyses behind FLOSS research publications be made expeditiously available to other researchers. Research on FLOSS has relied on several different kinds of scientific evidence, such as the archives created by the FLOSS developers, versioned code repositories, mailing list messages and bug and issue tracking repositories [1]. FLOSS teams retain and make public archives of many of their activities as by-products of their open technology-supported collaboration. However, the easy availability of primary data provides a misleading picture of ease of conducting research on FLOSS. Precisely because these data are by-products, they are generally not in a form that is useful for researchers. Instead potentially useful data is locked up in HTML pages, CVS log files, text-only mailing list archives or dumps of website databases. FLOSS research projects, therefore, expend significant energy collecting and restructuring these archives for their research, which is repetitive and wasteful [2]. Furthermore, different researchers will extract different data at different points in time, take different approaches to processing and cleaning data and make different decisions about analyses, but without all of these decisions being visible, auditable or reproducible. In principle, these latter problems can be addressed by individual researchers better documenting what they have done. However, research publications