The PhD thesis of Jonathan Sims on the relationship between organisations and the Drupal community, or the recent pilot study of Dani Nordin and Adi Meir to study the motivations of Drupal contributors show there is a crescent interest in Academia on the study of the Drupal community.
I think this BoF will be an excellent opportunity to collectively analyse and discuss the findings that have been done in Academia, and what can we learn as a community from them. Sims’ and Nordin’s are the most recent efforts, but as part of my PhD research, I am doing a literature review of the study of the Drupal community in Academia, and I will be happy to prepare a summary of all of the ones that I have found, so we can go through them and discuss these findings (and the possible ”gaps” to study in the future).
I believe it would also be a great opportunity to meet F2F those who are interested in the study of the Drupal community, so we can put a face to the names and explore how to collaborate and coordinate. For example, we could start by creating and making visible all the work in a group in groups.drupal.org (e.g.: ”Research about the Drupal community” group).