GRASS-Wiki - User contributions [en]

User:Pibinko

2020-05-18T08:54:57Z

⚠️Pibinko: added reference to profession

Since 2011 I am operating as a freelance on services related to culture, environment, open innovation, and music.
I have started using GRASS in 1994 (I believe one of the first ten users in Italy), at the beginning of my PhD, and have been using GIS since 1993 in variety of professional settings.

More information on my relation to free/open-source mapping on http://www.pibinko.org/maps/

User:Pibinko

2020-05-18T08:53:54Z

⚠️Pibinko: addedd presonal information

Since 2011 I am operating as a freelance on services related to culture, environment, open innovation, and music.
I have started using GRASS in 1994 (I believe one of the first ten users in Italy).

More information on my relation to free/open-source mapping on http://www.pibinko.org/maps/

GRASS Help/it

2009-09-13T20:45:00Z

⚠️Pibinko: Created page with '== Primi Passi == ''La maggior parte delle guide e degli esempi utilizzano i dati di prova della Spearfish County, South Dakota.'' Gli esempi pi…'

== Primi Passi ==

''La maggior parte delle guide e degli esempi utilizzano i dati di prova della [[GRASS_Help#Sample_Dataset | Spearfish County, South Dakota]].'' Gli esempi più nuovi si basano inoltre sulla [http://www.grassbook.org/data_menu3rd.php Base dati didattici OSGeo ] (North Carolina, USA)

=== Installazione ===

* Viene presentata nella [[Installation Guide/it]]

=== Frequently Asked Questions ===

* [[Faq|FAQ]]
* Potete contattare molti utenti GRASS in [[How to participate in IRC communication|IRC]]
* [[GRASS e i suoi and its siblings%3B a guide for the novice]]
* [[Come funziona il modello di sviluppoo del software Open Source]]

=== Documentazione per il primo giorno ===

* [http://grass.bologna.enea.it/tutorial/ Five minute program launch tutorial] di Lorenzo Moretti
: Le prime pagine sono specifiche per Mac OSX, le rimanenti sono generali.

* [http://grass.ibiblio.org/grass64/manuals/html64_user/helptext.html GRASS Quickstart] pagina di aiuto
* [http://grass.ibiblio.org/grass64/manuals/html64_user/index.html GRASS help pages] comprensive delle istruzioni di base

* [[Gis Concepts|Concetti GIS di base]] e loro implementazione in GRASS

==== Tutorial brevi ====

* [http://trac.osgeo.org/grass/wiki/HowToTestGrass6 Come collaudare GRASS6] - passaggi semplici da ripetere in GRASS 6.3 QGIS

* [http://web.archive.org/web/20060209031109/http://wwwamb.bologna.enea.it/forgrass/documents/Grass-6-Visual-Tutorial.pdf Visual Tutorial for GRASS 6.0] by L. Moretti (per utenti non UNIX, con interfaccia grafica)

* [http://mpa.itc.it/markus/osg05/ GRASS 6 in a nutshell] by M. Neteler (2005, short tutorial, tradotto anche in spagnolo e francese)

* The [[GRASS 6 Tutorial]] (a work in progress; seeking for volunteers)

* [http://www.gdf-hannover.de/lit_html/grass60_v1.2_en/index.html An introduction to the practical use of the Free Geographical Information System GRASS 6.0] by GDF Hannover

* [http://www.gdf-hannover.de/media.php?id=0&lg=en More tutorials] from GDF Hannover

==== Textbook ====

* [http://www.grassbook.org Open Source GIS: A GRASS GIS Approach. 3rd ed. 2008] by M. Neteler and H. Mitasova (Springer book; focus is on GRASS 6.3)

==== Individual modules ====

* [http://grass.ibiblio.org/gdp/grassmanuals/grass64_module_list.pdf Synopsis of GRASS modules] (PDF, 58k)
: ''Create current list with'' "<tt>make html2pdfdoc</tt>" or "<tt>cd tools; ./module_synopsis.sh</tt>" ''in GRASS 6.3+''

* Individual GRASS module [http://grass.ibiblio.org/grass64/manuals/html64_user/index.html reference manuals]

* All GRASS module reference manuals (PDF Book)
: ''Create current set with'' "<tt>make html2pdfdoccomplete</tt>" ''in GRASS 6.3+''

=== Sample Datasets ===

* [http://www.grassbook.org/data_menu3rd.php North Carolina, USA (OSGeo Edu dataset)] - rich data set prepared in 2007/2008
* [http://grass.ibiblio.org/download/data6.php Spearfish County, SD, USA] (not so far from Mount Rushmore) with [http://mpa.itc.it/markus/osg05/ extra data]
** Mount Rushmore: [43°53' N, 103°28' W]

* [[Global datasets]]

* [http://grass.ibiblio.org/download/data.php More sample data]

== Further Reading ==

* [[Documents|Full GRASS Documentation]]

* [[GRASS_Education_%28Free_GIS_education%29#Teaching_Materials | Teaching materials]] contributed by the community.<BR>(Tutorials, courseware, training videos, etc.)

* More GRASS documentation and tutorials from the old [http://grass.ibiblio.org/gdp/index.php GRASS Documentation Project].<BR>[''content is slowly being merged into this Wiki'']

== Migration from other GIS Software ==

* [[GRASS_migration_hints|GRASS migration hints]]
* [[GIS to GRASS command translation|GIS Software to GRASS command translation table and discussion]]
* [[Tips for Arc users]]

== Interfacing with external software ==

* [[Tips_and_Tricks#Using_QGIS_as_a_frontend_to_GRASS| QGIS]] frontend

* [[GRASS_and_Rstat|R statistics]] interface

* [[GRASS_and_GMT|GMT mapping]] cartography

* [[GRASS_and_MapServer| MapServer]] web server

* External databases ({{cmd|db.connect}})
* External raster data ({{cmd|r.external}})
* External vector data ({{cmd|v.external}})
* Paraview 3D visualization ({{cmd|r.out.vtk}}, {{cmd|r3.out.vtk}}, {{cmd|v.out.vtk}}) - see also [[GRASS and Paraview]]
* [[POV-Ray|POVray]] 3D visualization ({{cmd|r.out.pov}}, {{cmd|v.out.pov}})
* [[GRASS vector export to Inkscape]]

== Misc. Help ==

* [[:Category:FAQ|GRASS FAQ]] (see also: [[GRASS 6 Tutorial]])
* [[Tips and Tricks]]
* [[Compile and install GRASS and QGIS with GDAL/OGR Plugin]]
* [[How to interpolate point value using kriging method with R and GRASS 6]]

--------
* Wiki [[Help]] (how to edit pages after registration)

[[Category: Documentation]]
[[Category:Languages/it]]
{{Trans|Italian|English}}

GRASS mailing list community evolution

2009-04-04T10:57:59Z

⚠️Pibinko: added charts

=Watching how grass-dev develops (and grass-user is used)=

''DRAFT - work in progress'' - by A Giacomelli and M Neteler

==Introduction==

During the [http://gfoss2009.crs4.it/ 10th GRASS GFOSS User meeting] in Cagliari, Italy, a summary
of the activities of the Italian GFOSS community was presented.
Together with basic indicators on the activity of the Italian
community, some simple yet intriguing statistics, derived from an
analysis of the main discussion mailing lists were shown.
''(DARE DUE esempi SU QUESTO).''

In the typical brainstorming atmosphere which permits events such as
software user meetings, we considered the idea of replicating the same analysis
on two other mailing lists with a much longer history, namely the
grass developer ([http://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/grass-dev/ grass-dev]) and the grass user ([http://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/grass-user/ grass-user]) mailing lists.

The outcome of the analysis provides a unique insight on the dynamics
of the user and developer communities, over an extremely long time
span, from 1991 through 2008.

==How source data was collected==

The story of the creation of a seventeen-year long archive of communications deserves some description, as it is representative of the effort spent in maintaining a historical record of the communications within developers (and users) through various phases of the GRASS project.

SHORT STORY ABOUT LONG CONVERSATION (uh, could be better title)

* US Army mailing lists launch 12/1991
* interfaced with deja news (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deja_News) in ''(check MN)''
* Deja_News forum only ''(dovrei verificare ma ho gli mbox files delle liste, si fa preso con "mutt")''
* 1995 (?) email [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-mail_spam spam] nasce in Dejanews, carefully later polished manually from the list
* new mailing lists born in 1999 at University of Hannover as dejanews wasn't usable nor pratical ''(check MN)''
* in 2001 lists migrated to Italy with MN and server migration
* missing emails recovered from dejanews and merged into original lists mbox files (which MN received from US Army, don't remember precisely)
* All email headers for many years had to be reconstructed since their format was broken.
* complete archive restored and online ''(check date MN)''
* in 2007, lists migrated to OSGeo infrastructure

==Analysis Methodology==

The information extraction approach used leans on the KISS side: the
core of the parsing is handled by a perl script, while the remaining
post processing is carried out via standard queries and no-nonsense charting
tools.

==Time and space==

The first core set of information extracted was the time zone
reference of the messages, considering that time zone may be used to
provide an approximate indication of longitude.

One of the drivers for our analysis was also to verify if/how the mailing lists provided an evidence of the shift of development activity from the initial US-based model to Europe, rather than providing a detailed spatial distribution of the developers or the users.
This insured that simply considering the time zone reference would be an adequate proxy of location for the source of a given message.

For the grass-dev list, the results we obtained from a first pass with
the scripts developed was able to parse correctly over 99% percent of the messages.
It may be possible to obtain a greater completeness by refining the
parsing algorithm to handle exceptions encountered in the
process, but we considered the level of approximation obtained in the
extraction of the time zone reference to be adequate for the quality
objectives of our analysis.

For the grass-user mailing list, the number of messages with time zone
not identified by the first pass of the parsing algorithm is higher (some 3%), but still considered satisfactory within the scope of the current analysis.

==What do time and time zones tell==

The charts (include numbers) show:

* absolute number of message postings by time zone and year (Figures 1 and 4, respectively for GRASS-dev and GRASS-user)
* the relative proportion of messages posted each year from a given time zone (Figures 2 and 5, respectively for GRASS-dev and GRASS-user)
* the cumulated proportion of messages deriving from different time zones, calculated assuming 100% to be the e-mail traffic generated from the beginning of the mailing list records through 2008 (Figures 3 and 6, respectively for GRASS-dev and GRASS-user)

* Figure 7: local time of posting on grass-dev: shows that most of the communication is done on business hours (and some in the evening)
(mettere qui vari spunti)

[[File:1grassdev-post-by-tz.jpg]]
[[File:2grassdev-relproportion-by-tz.jpg]]
[[File:3grassdev-cumfreq.jpg]]
[[File:4grassuser-post-by-tz.jpg]]
[[File:5grassuser-relprop-by-tz.jpg]]
[[File:6grassuser-cumfreq.jpg]]
[[File:7grassdev-localtime.jpg]]

==...and what about the contents ?==

Another interesting analysis is represented by the text extraction of specific keywords from the message body. While it can be extremely intriguing to build dictionaries of words and expressions used within a mailing list, in the case of the GRASS lists, we decided to focus on GRASS commands. Matrices with the occurrence of GRASS commands by year were generated for both mailing lists.
The clear limitation in this type of analysis is that the use of a term is not associated to context. Reference to a specific command may not indicate if this is associated to a coding problem, to issues in use, or to working examples.
Another element which is neglected in the analysis is quotation: i.e. the occurrence of a term is counted as long as it appears in the body of a message.
At the same time, we think that even a preliminary analysis does provide extremely interesting insight on the bulk of mailing list traffic.

The review of the entries reported by the parser (Figures xx and yy) (DOVE CI PORTA ?)

[[File:8grassdev-commands-in-time.jpg]]
[[File:9grassuser-commands-in-time.jpg]]

yay... La cosa deve un po' crescere. (AL LIMITE CI LIMITIAMO A SPIEGARE CHE SIAMO CONTENTI DI AVER FATTO UNA PRIMA ESTRAZIONE...)

Reference for details beyond the top 20 entries: worksheets 5 and 6 of ODS file

==Poi==
- RELEASES AND EMAIL HYPE (faccio io)
- ANNI 90: depression and renewal
- ...

GRASS mailing list community evolution

2009-04-04T10:55:31Z

⚠️Pibinko: /* What do time and time zones tell */

=Watching how grass-dev develops (and grass-user is used)=

''DRAFT - work in progress'' - by A Giacomelli and M Neteler

==Introduction==

During the [http://gfoss2009.crs4.it/ 10th GRASS GFOSS User meeting] in Cagliari, Italy, a summary
of the activities of the Italian GFOSS community was presented.
Together with basic indicators on the activity of the Italian
community, some simple yet intriguing statistics, derived from an
analysis of the main discussion mailing lists were shown.
''(DARE DUE esempi SU QUESTO).''

In the typical brainstorming atmosphere which permits events such as
software user meetings, we considered the idea of replicating the same analysis
on two other mailing lists with a much longer history, namely the
grass developer ([http://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/grass-dev/ grass-dev]) and the grass user ([http://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/grass-user/ grass-user]) mailing lists.

The outcome of the analysis provides a unique insight on the dynamics
of the user and developer communities, over an extremely long time
span, from 1991 through 2008.

==How source data was collected==

The story of the creation of a seventeen-year long archive of communications deserves some description, as it is representative of the effort spent in maintaining a historical record of the communications within developers (and users) through various phases of the GRASS project.

SHORT STORY ABOUT LONG CONVERSATION (uh, could be better title)

* US Army mailing lists launch 12/1991
* interfaced with deja news (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deja_News) in ''(check MN)''
* Deja_News forum only ''(dovrei verificare ma ho gli mbox files delle liste, si fa preso con "mutt")''
* 1995 (?) email [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-mail_spam spam] nasce in Dejanews, carefully later polished manually from the list
* new mailing lists born in 1999 at University of Hannover as dejanews wasn't usable nor pratical ''(check MN)''
* in 2001 lists migrated to Italy with MN and server migration
* missing emails recovered from dejanews and merged into original lists mbox files (which MN received from US Army, don't remember precisely)
* All email headers for many years had to be reconstructed since their format was broken.
* complete archive restored and online ''(check date MN)''
* in 2007, lists migrated to OSGeo infrastructure

==Analysis Methodology==

The information extraction approach used leans on the KISS side: the
core of the parsing is handled by a perl script, while the remaining
post processing is carried out via standard queries and no-nonsense charting
tools.

==Time and space==

The first core set of information extracted was the time zone
reference of the messages, considering that time zone may be used to
provide an approximate indication of longitude.

One of the drivers for our analysis was also to verify if/how the mailing lists provided an evidence of the shift of development activity from the initial US-based model to Europe, rather than providing a detailed spatial distribution of the developers or the users.
This insured that simply considering the time zone reference would be an adequate proxy of location for the source of a given message.

For the grass-dev list, the results we obtained from a first pass with
the scripts developed was able to parse correctly over 99% percent of the messages.
It may be possible to obtain a greater completeness by refining the
parsing algorithm to handle exceptions encountered in the
process, but we considered the level of approximation obtained in the
extraction of the time zone reference to be adequate for the quality
objectives of our analysis.

For the grass-user mailing list, the number of messages with time zone
not identified by the first pass of the parsing algorithm is higher (some 3%), but still considered satisfactory within the scope of the current analysis.

==What do time and time zones tell==

The charts (include numbers) show:

* absolute number of message postings by time zone and year (Figures 1 and 4, respectively for GRASS-dev and GRASS-user)
* the relative proportion of messages posted each year from a given time zone (Figures 2 and 5, respectively for GRASS-dev and GRASS-user)
* the cumulated proportion of messages deriving from different time zones, calculated assuming 100% to be the e-mail traffic generated from the beginning of the mailing list records through 2008 (Figures 3 and 6, respectively for GRASS-dev and GRASS-user)

* Figure 7: local time of posting on grass-dev: shows that most of the communication is done on business hours (and some in the evening)
(mettere qui vari spunti)

[[File:1grassdev-post-by-tz.jpg]]
[[File:2grassdev-relproportion-by-tz.jpg]]
[[File:3grassdev-cumfreq.jpg]]
[[File:4grassuser-post-by-tz.jpg]]
[[File:5grassuser-relprop-by-tz.jpg]]
[[File:6grassuser-cumfreq.jpg]]
[[File:7grassdev-localtime.jpg]]
[[File:8grassdev-commands-in-time.jpg]]
[[File:9grassuser-commands-in-time.jpg]]

==...and what about the contents ?==

Another interesting analysis is represented by the text extraction of specific keywords from the message body. While it can be extremely intriguing to build dictionaries of words and expressions used within a mailing list, in the case of the GRASS lists, we decided to focus on GRASS commands. Matrices with the occurrence of GRASS commands by year were generated for both mailing lists.
The clear limitation in this type of analysis is that the use of a term is not associated to context. Reference to a specific command may not indicate if this is associated to a coding problem, to issues in use, or to working examples.
Another element which is neglected in the analysis is quotation: i.e. the occurrence of a term is counted as long as it appears in the body of a message.
The review of the entries reported by the parser (Figures xx and yy) (DOVE CI PORTA ?)

yay... La cosa deve un po' crescere. (AL LIMITE CI LIMITIAMO A SPIEGARE CHE SIAMO CONTENTI DI AVER FATTO UNA PRIMA ESTRAZIONE...)

Reference: worksheets 5 and 6 of ODS file, which will become Table 1 (for GRASS-dev terms) and Table 6 (for GRASS-user terms)

==Poi==
- RELEASES AND EMAIL HYPE (faccio io)
- ANNI 90: depression and renewal
- ...

File:9grassuser-commands-in-time.jpg

2009-04-04T10:54:28Z

⚠️Pibinko:

File:8grassdev-commands-in-time.jpg

2009-04-04T10:53:55Z

⚠️Pibinko:

File:7grassdev-localtime.jpg

2009-04-04T10:49:53Z

⚠️Pibinko:

File:6grassuser-cumfreq.jpg

2009-04-04T10:48:42Z

⚠️Pibinko:

File:5grassuser-relprop-by-tz.jpg

2009-04-04T10:48:08Z

⚠️Pibinko:

File:4grassuser-post-by-tz.jpg

2009-04-04T10:47:35Z

⚠️Pibinko:

File:3grassdev-cumfreq.jpg

2009-04-04T10:46:41Z

⚠️Pibinko:

File:2grassdev-relproportion-by-tz.jpg

2009-04-04T10:46:10Z

⚠️Pibinko:

GRASS mailing list community evolution

2009-04-04T10:45:15Z

⚠️Pibinko: /* What do time and time zones tell */

=Watching how grass-dev develops (and grass-user is used)=

''DRAFT - work in progress'' - by A Giacomelli and M Neteler

==Introduction==

During the [http://gfoss2009.crs4.it/ 10th GRASS GFOSS User meeting] in Cagliari, Italy, a summary
of the activities of the Italian GFOSS community was presented.
Together with basic indicators on the activity of the Italian
community, some simple yet intriguing statistics, derived from an
analysis of the main discussion mailing lists were shown.
''(DARE DUE esempi SU QUESTO).''

In the typical brainstorming atmosphere which permits events such as
software user meetings, we considered the idea of replicating the same analysis
on two other mailing lists with a much longer history, namely the
grass developer ([http://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/grass-dev/ grass-dev]) and the grass user ([http://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/grass-user/ grass-user]) mailing lists.

The outcome of the analysis provides a unique insight on the dynamics
of the user and developer communities, over an extremely long time
span, from 1991 through 2008.

==How source data was collected==

The story of the creation of a seventeen-year long archive of communications deserves some description, as it is representative of the effort spent in maintaining a historical record of the communications within developers (and users) through various phases of the GRASS project.

SHORT STORY ABOUT LONG CONVERSATION (uh, could be better title)

* US Army mailing lists launch 12/1991
* interfaced with deja news (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deja_News) in ''(check MN)''
* Deja_News forum only ''(dovrei verificare ma ho gli mbox files delle liste, si fa preso con "mutt")''
* 1995 (?) email [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-mail_spam spam] nasce in Dejanews, carefully later polished manually from the list
* new mailing lists born in 1999 at University of Hannover as dejanews wasn't usable nor pratical ''(check MN)''
* in 2001 lists migrated to Italy with MN and server migration
* missing emails recovered from dejanews and merged into original lists mbox files (which MN received from US Army, don't remember precisely)
* All email headers for many years had to be reconstructed since their format was broken.
* complete archive restored and online ''(check date MN)''
* in 2007, lists migrated to OSGeo infrastructure

==Analysis Methodology==

The information extraction approach used leans on the KISS side: the
core of the parsing is handled by a perl script, while the remaining
post processing is carried out via standard queries and no-nonsense charting
tools.

==Time and space==

The first core set of information extracted was the time zone
reference of the messages, considering that time zone may be used to
provide an approximate indication of longitude.

One of the drivers for our analysis was also to verify if/how the mailing lists provided an evidence of the shift of development activity from the initial US-based model to Europe, rather than providing a detailed spatial distribution of the developers or the users.
This insured that simply considering the time zone reference would be an adequate proxy of location for the source of a given message.

For the grass-dev list, the results we obtained from a first pass with
the scripts developed was able to parse correctly over 99% percent of the messages.
It may be possible to obtain a greater completeness by refining the
parsing algorithm to handle exceptions encountered in the
process, but we considered the level of approximation obtained in the
extraction of the time zone reference to be adequate for the quality
objectives of our analysis.

For the grass-user mailing list, the number of messages with time zone
not identified by the first pass of the parsing algorithm is higher (some 3%), but still considered satisfactory within the scope of the current analysis.

==What do time and time zones tell==

The charts (include numbers) show:

* absolute number of message postings by time zone and year (Figures 1 and 4, respectively for GRASS-dev and GRASS-user)
* the relative proportion of messages posted each year from a given time zone (Figures 2 and 5, respectively for GRASS-dev and GRASS-user)
* the cumulated proportion of messages deriving from different time zones, calculated assuming 100% to be the e-mail traffic generated from the beginning of the mailing list records through 2008 (Figures 3 and 6, respectively for GRASS-dev and GRASS-user)

* Figure 7: local time of posting on grass-dev: shows that most of the communication is done on business hours (and some in the evening)
(mettere qui vari spunti)

[[File:1grassdev-post-by-tz.jpg]]

==...and what about the contents ?==

Another interesting analysis is represented by the text extraction of specific keywords from the message body. While it can be extremely intriguing to build dictionaries of words and expressions used within a mailing list, in the case of the GRASS lists, we decided to focus on GRASS commands. Matrices with the occurrence of GRASS commands by year were generated for both mailing lists.
The clear limitation in this type of analysis is that the use of a term is not associated to context. Reference to a specific command may not indicate if this is associated to a coding problem, to issues in use, or to working examples.
Another element which is neglected in the analysis is quotation: i.e. the occurrence of a term is counted as long as it appears in the body of a message.
The review of the entries reported by the parser (Figures xx and yy) (DOVE CI PORTA ?)

yay... La cosa deve un po' crescere. (AL LIMITE CI LIMITIAMO A SPIEGARE CHE SIAMO CONTENTI DI AVER FATTO UNA PRIMA ESTRAZIONE...)

Reference: worksheets 5 and 6 of ODS file, which will become Table 1 (for GRASS-dev terms) and Table 6 (for GRASS-user terms)

==Poi==
- RELEASES AND EMAIL HYPE (faccio io)
- ANNI 90: depression and renewal
- ...

File:1grassdev-post-by-tz.jpg

2009-04-04T10:44:03Z

⚠️Pibinko:

GRASS mailing list community evolution

2009-04-04T09:41:19Z

⚠️Pibinko: /* ...and what about the contents ? */

=Watching how grass-dev develops (and grass-user is used)=

''DRAFT - work in progress'' - by A Giacomelli and M Neteler

==Introduction==

During the [http://gfoss2009.crs4.it/ 10th GRASS GFOSS User meeting] in Cagliari, Italy, a summary
of the activities of the Italian GFOSS community was presented.
Together with basic indicators on the activity of the Italian
community, some simple yet intriguing statistics, derived from an
analysis of the main discussion mailing lists were shown.
''(DARE DUE esempi SU QUESTO).''

In the typical brainstorming atmosphere which permits events such as
software user meetings, we considered the idea of replicating the same analysis
on two other mailing lists with a much longer history, namely the
grass developer ([http://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/grass-dev/ grass-dev]) and the grass user ([http://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/grass-user/ grass-user]) mailing lists.

The outcome of the analysis provides a unique insight on the dynamics
of the user and developer communities, over an extremely long time
span, from 1991 through 2008.

==How source data was collected==

The story of the creation of a seventeen-year long archive of communications deserves some description, as it is representative of the effort spent in maintaining a historical record of the communications within developers (and users) through various phases of the GRASS project.

SHORT STORY ABOUT LONG CONVERSATION (uh, could be better title)

* US Army mailing lists launch 12/1991
* interfaced with deja news (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deja_News) in ''(check MN)''
* Deja_News forum only ''(dovrei verificare ma ho gli mbox files delle liste, si fa preso con "mutt")''
* 1995 (?) email [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-mail_spam spam] nasce in Dejanews, carefully later polished manually from the list
* new mailing lists born in 1999 at University of Hannover as dejanews wasn't usable nor pratical ''(check MN)''
* in 2001 lists migrated to Italy with MN and server migration
* missing emails recovered from dejanews and merged into original lists mbox files (which MN received from US Army, don't remember precisely)
* All email headers for many years had to be reconstructed since their format was broken.
* complete archive restored and online ''(check date MN)''
* in 2007, lists migrated to OSGeo infrastructure

==Analysis Methodology==

The information extraction approach used leans on the KISS side: the
core of the parsing is handled by a perl script, while the remaining
post processing is carried out via standard queries and no-nonsense charting
tools.

==Time and space==

The first core set of information extracted was the time zone
reference of the messages, considering that time zone may be used to
provide an approximate indication of longitude.

One of the drivers for our analysis was also to verify if/how the mailing lists provided an evidence of the shift of development activity from the initial US-based model to Europe, rather than providing a detailed spatial distribution of the developers or the users.
This insured that simply considering the time zone reference would be an adequate proxy of location for the source of a given message.

For the grass-dev list, the results we obtained from a first pass with
the scripts developed was able to parse correctly over 99% percent of the messages.
It may be possible to obtain a greater completeness by refining the
parsing algorithm to handle exceptions encountered in the
process, but we considered the level of approximation obtained in the
extraction of the time zone reference to be adequate for the quality
objectives of our analysis.

For the grass-user mailing list, the number of messages with time zone
not identified by the first pass of the parsing algorithm is higher (some 3%), but still considered satisfactory within the scope of the current analysis.

==What do time and time zones tell==

The charts (include numbers) show:

* absolute number of message postings by time zone and year (Figures 1 and 4, respectively for GRASS-dev and GRASS-user)
* the relative proportion of messages posted each year from a given time zone (Figures 2 and 5, respectively for GRASS-dev and GRASS-user)
* the cumulated proportion of messages deriving from different time zones, calculated assuming 100% to be the e-mail traffic generated from the beginning of the mailing list records through 2008 (Figures 3 and 6, respectively for GRASS-dev and GRASS-user)

* Figure 7: local time of posting on grass-dev: shows that most of the communication is done on business hours (and some in the evening)
(mettere qui vari spunti)

==...and what about the contents ?==

Another interesting analysis is represented by the text extraction of specific keywords from the message body. While it can be extremely intriguing to build dictionaries of words and expressions used within a mailing list, in the case of the GRASS lists, we decided to focus on GRASS commands. Matrices with the occurrence of GRASS commands by year were generated for both mailing lists.
The clear limitation in this type of analysis is that the use of a term is not associated to context. Reference to a specific command may not indicate if this is associated to a coding problem, to issues in use, or to working examples.
Another element which is neglected in the analysis is quotation: i.e. the occurrence of a term is counted as long as it appears in the body of a message.
The review of the entries reported by the parser (Figures xx and yy) (DOVE CI PORTA ?)

yay... La cosa deve un po' crescere. (AL LIMITE CI LIMITIAMO A SPIEGARE CHE SIAMO CONTENTI DI AVER FATTO UNA PRIMA ESTRAZIONE...)

Reference: worksheets 5 and 6 of ODS file, which will become Table 1 (for GRASS-dev terms) and Table 6 (for GRASS-user terms)

==Poi==
- RELEASES AND EMAIL HYPE (faccio io)
- ANNI 90: depression and renewal
- ...

GRASS mailing list community evolution

2009-04-04T09:38:04Z

⚠️Pibinko: /* What do time and time zones tell */

=Watching how grass-dev develops (and grass-user is used)=

''DRAFT - work in progress'' - by A Giacomelli and M Neteler

==Introduction==

During the [http://gfoss2009.crs4.it/ 10th GRASS GFOSS User meeting] in Cagliari, Italy, a summary
of the activities of the Italian GFOSS community was presented.
Together with basic indicators on the activity of the Italian
community, some simple yet intriguing statistics, derived from an
analysis of the main discussion mailing lists were shown.
''(DARE DUE esempi SU QUESTO).''

In the typical brainstorming atmosphere which permits events such as
software user meetings, we considered the idea of replicating the same analysis
on two other mailing lists with a much longer history, namely the
grass developer ([http://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/grass-dev/ grass-dev]) and the grass user ([http://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/grass-user/ grass-user]) mailing lists.

The outcome of the analysis provides a unique insight on the dynamics
of the user and developer communities, over an extremely long time
span, from 1991 through 2008.

==How source data was collected==

The story of the creation of a seventeen-year long archive of communications deserves some description, as it is representative of the effort spent in maintaining a historical record of the communications within developers (and users) through various phases of the GRASS project.

SHORT STORY ABOUT LONG CONVERSATION (uh, could be better title)

* US Army mailing lists launch 12/1991
* interfaced with deja news (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deja_News) in ''(check MN)''
* Deja_News forum only ''(dovrei verificare ma ho gli mbox files delle liste, si fa preso con "mutt")''
* 1995 (?) email [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-mail_spam spam] nasce in Dejanews, carefully later polished manually from the list
* new mailing lists born in 1999 at University of Hannover as dejanews wasn't usable nor pratical ''(check MN)''
* in 2001 lists migrated to Italy with MN and server migration
* missing emails recovered from dejanews and merged into original lists mbox files (which MN received from US Army, don't remember precisely)
* All email headers for many years had to be reconstructed since their format was broken.
* complete archive restored and online ''(check date MN)''
* in 2007, lists migrated to OSGeo infrastructure

==Analysis Methodology==

The information extraction approach used leans on the KISS side: the
core of the parsing is handled by a perl script, while the remaining
post processing is carried out via standard queries and no-nonsense charting
tools.

==Time and space==

The first core set of information extracted was the time zone
reference of the messages, considering that time zone may be used to
provide an approximate indication of longitude.

One of the drivers for our analysis was also to verify if/how the mailing lists provided an evidence of the shift of development activity from the initial US-based model to Europe, rather than providing a detailed spatial distribution of the developers or the users.
This insured that simply considering the time zone reference would be an adequate proxy of location for the source of a given message.

For the grass-dev list, the results we obtained from a first pass with
the scripts developed was able to parse correctly over 99% percent of the messages.
It may be possible to obtain a greater completeness by refining the
parsing algorithm to handle exceptions encountered in the
process, but we considered the level of approximation obtained in the
extraction of the time zone reference to be adequate for the quality
objectives of our analysis.

For the grass-user mailing list, the number of messages with time zone
not identified by the first pass of the parsing algorithm is higher (some 3%), but still considered satisfactory within the scope of the current analysis.

==What do time and time zones tell==

The charts (include numbers) show:

* absolute number of message postings by time zone and year (Figures 1 and 4, respectively for GRASS-dev and GRASS-user)
* the relative proportion of messages posted each year from a given time zone (Figures 2 and 5, respectively for GRASS-dev and GRASS-user)
* the cumulated proportion of messages deriving from different time zones, calculated assuming 100% to be the e-mail traffic generated from the beginning of the mailing list records through 2008 (Figures 3 and 6, respectively for GRASS-dev and GRASS-user)

* Figure 7: local time of posting on grass-dev: shows that most of the communication is done on business hours (and some in the evening)
(mettere qui vari spunti)

==...and what about the contents ?==

Another interesting analysis is represented by the text extraction of specific keywords from the message body. While it can be extremely intriguing to build dictionaries of words and expressions used within a mailing list, in the case of the GRASS lists, we decided to focus on GRASS commands. Matrices with the occurrence of GRASS commands by year were generated for both mailing lists.
The clear limitation in this type of analysis is that the use of a term is not associated to context. Reference to a specific command may not indicate if this is associated to a coding problem, to issues in use, or to working examples.
Another element which is neglected in the analysis is quotation: i.e. the occurrence of a term is counted as long as it appears in the body of a message.
The review of the entries reported by the parser (Figures xx and yy) (DOVE CI PORTA ?)

yay... La cosa deve un po' crescere. (AL LIMITE CI LIMITIAMO A SPIEGARE CHE SIAMO CONTENTI DI AVER FATTO UNA PRIMA ESTRAZIONE...)

==Poi==
- RELEASES AND EMAIL HYPE (faccio io)
- ANNI 90: depression and renewal
- ...

GRASS mailing list community evolution

2009-03-26T21:04:57Z

⚠️Pibinko: /* ...and what about the contents ? */

=Watching how grass-dev develops (and grass-user is used)=

''DRAFT - work in progress'' - by A Giacomelli and M Neteler

==Introduction==

During the [http://gfoss2009.crs4.it/ 10th GRASS GFOSS User meeting] in Cagliari, Italy, a summary
of the activities of the Italian GFOSS community was presented.
Together with basic indicators on the activity of the Italian
community, some simple yet intriguing statistics, derived from an
analysis of the main discussion mailing lists were shown.
''(DARE DUE esempi SU QUESTO).''

In the typical brainstorming atmosphere which permits events such as
software user meetings, we considered the idea of replicating the same analysis
on two other mailing lists with a much longer history, namely the
grass developer ([http://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/grass-dev/ grass-dev]) and the grass user ([http://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/grass-user/ grass-user]) mailing lists.

The outcome of the analysis provides a unique insight on the dynamics
of the user and developer communities, over an extremely long time
span, from 1991 through 2008.

==How source data was collected==

The story of the creation of a seventeen-year long archive of communications deserves some description, as it is representative of the effort spent in maintaining a historical record of the communications within developers (and users) through various phases of the GRASS project.

SHORT STORY ABOUT LONG CONVERSATION (uh, could be better title)

* US Army mailing lists launch 12/1991
* interfaced with deja news (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deja_News) in ''(check MN)''
* Deja_News forum only ''(dovrei verificare ma ho gli mbox files delle liste, si fa preso con "mutt")''
* 1995 (?) email [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-mail_spam spam] nasce in Dejanews, carefully later polished manually from the list
* new mailing lists born in 1999 at University of Hannover as dejanews wasn't usable nor pratical ''(check MN)''
* in 2001 lists migrated to Italy with MN and server migration
* missing emails recovered from dejanews and merged into original lists mbox files (which MN received from US Army, don't remember precisely)
* All email headers for many years had to be reconstructed since their format was broken.
* complete archive restored and online ''(check date MN)''
* in 2007, lists migrated to OSGeo infrastructure

==Analysis Methodology==

The information extraction approach used leans on the KISS side: the
core of the parsing is handled by a perl script, while the remaining
post processing is carried out via standard queries and no-nonsense charting
tools.

==Time and space==

The first core set of information extracted was the time zone
reference of the messages, considering that time zone may be used to
provide an approximate indication of longitude.

One of the drivers for our analysis was also to verify if/how the mailing lists provided an evidence of the shift of development activity from the initial US-based model to Europe, rather than providing a detailed spatial distribution of the developers or the users.
This insured that simply considering the time zone reference would be an adequate proxy of location for the source of a given message.

For the grass-dev list, the results we obtained from a first pass with
the scripts developed was able to parse correctly over 99% percent of the messages.
It may be possible to obtain a greater completeness by refining the
parsing algorithm to handle exceptions encountered in the
process, but we considered the level of approximation obtained in the
extraction of the time zone reference to be adequate for the quality
objectives of our analysis.

For the grass-user mailing list, the number of messages with time zone
not identified by the first pass of the parsing algorithm is higher (some 3%), but still considered satisfactory within the scope of the current analysis.

==What do time and time zones tell==

The charts (include numbers) show:

* absolute number of message postings by time zone and year
* the relative proportion of messages posted each year from a given time zone.
* the cumulated proportion of messages deriving from different time zones, calculated assuming 100% to be the e-mail traffic generated from the beginning of the mailing list records through 2008.

(mettere qui vari spunti)

==...and what about the contents ?==

Another interesting analysis is represented by the text extraction of specific keywords from the message body. While it can be extremely intriguing to build dictionaries of words and expressions used within a mailing list, in the case of the GRASS lists, we decided to focus on GRASS commands. Matrices with the occurrence of GRASS commands by year were generated for both mailing lists.
The clear limitation in this type of analysis is that the use of a term is not associated to context. Reference to a specific command may not indicate if this is associated to a coding problem, to issues in use, or to working examples.
Another element which is neglected in the analysis is quotation: i.e. the occurrence of a term is counted as long as it appears in the body of a message.
The review of the entries reported by the parser (Figures xx and yy) (DOVE CI PORTA ?)

yay... La cosa deve un po' crescere. (AL LIMITE CI LIMITIAMO A SPIEGARE CHE SIAMO CONTENTI DI AVER FATTO UNA PRIMA ESTRAZIONE...)

==Poi==
- RELEASES AND EMAIL HYPE (faccio io)
- ANNI 90: depression and renewal
- ...

GRASS mailing list community evolution

2009-03-26T21:04:37Z

⚠️Pibinko: /* ...and what about the contents ? */

=Watching how grass-dev develops (and grass-user is used)=

''DRAFT - work in progress'' - by A Giacomelli and M Neteler

==Introduction==

During the [http://gfoss2009.crs4.it/ 10th GRASS GFOSS User meeting] in Cagliari, Italy, a summary
of the activities of the Italian GFOSS community was presented.
Together with basic indicators on the activity of the Italian
community, some simple yet intriguing statistics, derived from an
analysis of the main discussion mailing lists were shown.
''(DARE DUE esempi SU QUESTO).''

In the typical brainstorming atmosphere which permits events such as
software user meetings, we considered the idea of replicating the same analysis
on two other mailing lists with a much longer history, namely the
grass developer ([http://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/grass-dev/ grass-dev]) and the grass user ([http://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/grass-user/ grass-user]) mailing lists.

The outcome of the analysis provides a unique insight on the dynamics
of the user and developer communities, over an extremely long time
span, from 1991 through 2008.

==How source data was collected==

The story of the creation of a seventeen-year long archive of communications deserves some description, as it is representative of the effort spent in maintaining a historical record of the communications within developers (and users) through various phases of the GRASS project.

SHORT STORY ABOUT LONG CONVERSATION (uh, could be better title)

* US Army mailing lists launch 12/1991
* interfaced with deja news (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deja_News) in ''(check MN)''
* Deja_News forum only ''(dovrei verificare ma ho gli mbox files delle liste, si fa preso con "mutt")''
* 1995 (?) email [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-mail_spam spam] nasce in Dejanews, carefully later polished manually from the list
* new mailing lists born in 1999 at University of Hannover as dejanews wasn't usable nor pratical ''(check MN)''
* in 2001 lists migrated to Italy with MN and server migration
* missing emails recovered from dejanews and merged into original lists mbox files (which MN received from US Army, don't remember precisely)
* All email headers for many years had to be reconstructed since their format was broken.
* complete archive restored and online ''(check date MN)''
* in 2007, lists migrated to OSGeo infrastructure

==Analysis Methodology==

The information extraction approach used leans on the KISS side: the
core of the parsing is handled by a perl script, while the remaining
post processing is carried out via standard queries and no-nonsense charting
tools.

==Time and space==

The first core set of information extracted was the time zone
reference of the messages, considering that time zone may be used to
provide an approximate indication of longitude.

One of the drivers for our analysis was also to verify if/how the mailing lists provided an evidence of the shift of development activity from the initial US-based model to Europe, rather than providing a detailed spatial distribution of the developers or the users.
This insured that simply considering the time zone reference would be an adequate proxy of location for the source of a given message.

For the grass-dev list, the results we obtained from a first pass with
the scripts developed was able to parse correctly over 99% percent of the messages.
It may be possible to obtain a greater completeness by refining the
parsing algorithm to handle exceptions encountered in the
process, but we considered the level of approximation obtained in the
extraction of the time zone reference to be adequate for the quality
objectives of our analysis.

For the grass-user mailing list, the number of messages with time zone
not identified by the first pass of the parsing algorithm is higher (some 3%), but still considered satisfactory within the scope of the current analysis.

==What do time and time zones tell==

The charts (include numbers) show:

* absolute number of message postings by time zone and year
* the relative proportion of messages posted each year from a given time zone.
* the cumulated proportion of messages deriving from different time zones, calculated assuming 100% to be the e-mail traffic generated from the beginning of the mailing list records through 2008.

(mettere qui vari spunti)

==...and what about the contents ?==

Another interesting analysis is represented by the text extraction of specific keywords from the message body. While it can be extremely intriguing to build dictionaries of words and expressions used within a mailing list, in the case of the GRASS lists, we decided to focus on GRASS commands. Matrices with the occurrence of GRASS commands by year were generated
for both mailing lists.
The clear limitation in this type of analysis is that the use of a term is not associated to context. Reference to a specific command may not indicate if this is associated to a coding problem, to issues in use, or to working examples.
Another element which is neglected in the analysis is quotation: i.e. the occurrence of a term is counted as long as it appears in the body of a message.
The review of the entries reported by the parser (Figures xx and yy) (DOVE CI PORTA ?)

yay... La cosa deve un po' crescere. (AL LIMITE CI LIMITIAMO A SPIEGARE CHE SIAMO CONTENTI DI AVER FATTO UNA PRIMA ESTRAZIONE...)

==Poi==
- RELEASES AND EMAIL HYPE (faccio io)
- ANNI 90: depression and renewal
- ...

GRASS mailing list community evolution

2009-03-26T21:04:01Z

⚠️Pibinko: /* ...and what about the contents ? */

=Watching how grass-dev develops (and grass-user is used)=

''DRAFT - work in progress'' - by A Giacomelli and M Neteler

==Introduction==

During the [http://gfoss2009.crs4.it/ 10th GRASS GFOSS User meeting] in Cagliari, Italy, a summary
of the activities of the Italian GFOSS community was presented.
Together with basic indicators on the activity of the Italian
community, some simple yet intriguing statistics, derived from an
analysis of the main discussion mailing lists were shown.
''(DARE DUE esempi SU QUESTO).''

In the typical brainstorming atmosphere which permits events such as
software user meetings, we considered the idea of replicating the same analysis
on two other mailing lists with a much longer history, namely the
grass developer ([http://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/grass-dev/ grass-dev]) and the grass user ([http://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/grass-user/ grass-user]) mailing lists.

The outcome of the analysis provides a unique insight on the dynamics
of the user and developer communities, over an extremely long time
span, from 1991 through 2008.

==How source data was collected==

The story of the creation of a seventeen-year long archive of communications deserves some description, as it is representative of the effort spent in maintaining a historical record of the communications within developers (and users) through various phases of the GRASS project.

SHORT STORY ABOUT LONG CONVERSATION (uh, could be better title)

* US Army mailing lists launch 12/1991
* interfaced with deja news (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deja_News) in ''(check MN)''
* Deja_News forum only ''(dovrei verificare ma ho gli mbox files delle liste, si fa preso con "mutt")''
* 1995 (?) email [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-mail_spam spam] nasce in Dejanews, carefully later polished manually from the list
* new mailing lists born in 1999 at University of Hannover as dejanews wasn't usable nor pratical ''(check MN)''
* in 2001 lists migrated to Italy with MN and server migration
* missing emails recovered from dejanews and merged into original lists mbox files (which MN received from US Army, don't remember precisely)
* All email headers for many years had to be reconstructed since their format was broken.
* complete archive restored and online ''(check date MN)''
* in 2007, lists migrated to OSGeo infrastructure

==Analysis Methodology==

The information extraction approach used leans on the KISS side: the
core of the parsing is handled by a perl script, while the remaining
post processing is carried out via standard queries and no-nonsense charting
tools.

==Time and space==

The first core set of information extracted was the time zone
reference of the messages, considering that time zone may be used to
provide an approximate indication of longitude.

One of the drivers for our analysis was also to verify if/how the mailing lists provided an evidence of the shift of development activity from the initial US-based model to Europe, rather than providing a detailed spatial distribution of the developers or the users.
This insured that simply considering the time zone reference would be an adequate proxy of location for the source of a given message.

For the grass-dev list, the results we obtained from a first pass with
the scripts developed was able to parse correctly over 99% percent of the messages.
It may be possible to obtain a greater completeness by refining the
parsing algorithm to handle exceptions encountered in the
process, but we considered the level of approximation obtained in the
extraction of the time zone reference to be adequate for the quality
objectives of our analysis.

For the grass-user mailing list, the number of messages with time zone
not identified by the first pass of the parsing algorithm is higher (some 3%), but still considered satisfactory within the scope of the current analysis.

==What do time and time zones tell==

The charts (include numbers) show:

* absolute number of message postings by time zone and year
* the relative proportion of messages posted each year from a given time zone.
* the cumulated proportion of messages deriving from different time zones, calculated assuming 100% to be the e-mail traffic generated from the beginning of the mailing list records through 2008.

(mettere qui vari spunti)

==...and what about the contents ?==

Another interesting analysis is represented by the text extraction of specific keywords from the message body. While it can be extremely intriguing to build dictionaries of words and expressions used within a mailing list, in the case of the GRASS lists, we decided to focus on GRASS commands.

Matrices with the occurrence of GRASS commands by year were generated
for both mailing lists.
The clear limitation in this type of analysis is that the use of a
term is not associated to context. Reference to a specific command may
not indicate if this is associated to a coding problem, to issues in
use, or to working examples.
Another element which is neglected in the analysis is quotation: i.e.
the occurrence of a term is counted as long as it appears in the body
of a message.
The review of the entries reported by the parser (Figures xx and yy) (DOVE CI PORTA ?)

yay... La cosa deve un po' crescere. (AL LIMITE CI LIMITIAMO A SPIEGARE CHE SIAMO CONTENTI DI AVER FATTO UNA PRIMA ESTRAZIONE...)

==Poi==
- RELEASES AND EMAIL HYPE (faccio io)
- ANNI 90: depression and renewal
- ...

GRASS mailing list community evolution

2009-03-26T21:03:29Z

⚠️Pibinko: /* What do time and time zones tell */

=Watching how grass-dev develops (and grass-user is used)=

''DRAFT - work in progress'' - by A Giacomelli and M Neteler

==Introduction==

During the [http://gfoss2009.crs4.it/ 10th GRASS GFOSS User meeting] in Cagliari, Italy, a summary
of the activities of the Italian GFOSS community was presented.
Together with basic indicators on the activity of the Italian
community, some simple yet intriguing statistics, derived from an
analysis of the main discussion mailing lists were shown.
''(DARE DUE esempi SU QUESTO).''

In the typical brainstorming atmosphere which permits events such as
software user meetings, we considered the idea of replicating the same analysis
on two other mailing lists with a much longer history, namely the
grass developer ([http://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/grass-dev/ grass-dev]) and the grass user ([http://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/grass-user/ grass-user]) mailing lists.

The outcome of the analysis provides a unique insight on the dynamics
of the user and developer communities, over an extremely long time
span, from 1991 through 2008.

==How source data was collected==

The story of the creation of a seventeen-year long archive of communications deserves some description, as it is representative of the effort spent in maintaining a historical record of the communications within developers (and users) through various phases of the GRASS project.

SHORT STORY ABOUT LONG CONVERSATION (uh, could be better title)

* US Army mailing lists launch 12/1991
* interfaced with deja news (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deja_News) in ''(check MN)''
* Deja_News forum only ''(dovrei verificare ma ho gli mbox files delle liste, si fa preso con "mutt")''
* 1995 (?) email [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-mail_spam spam] nasce in Dejanews, carefully later polished manually from the list
* new mailing lists born in 1999 at University of Hannover as dejanews wasn't usable nor pratical ''(check MN)''
* in 2001 lists migrated to Italy with MN and server migration
* missing emails recovered from dejanews and merged into original lists mbox files (which MN received from US Army, don't remember precisely)
* All email headers for many years had to be reconstructed since their format was broken.
* complete archive restored and online ''(check date MN)''
* in 2007, lists migrated to OSGeo infrastructure

==Analysis Methodology==

The information extraction approach used leans on the KISS side: the
core of the parsing is handled by a perl script, while the remaining
post processing is carried out via standard queries and no-nonsense charting
tools.

==Time and space==

The first core set of information extracted was the time zone
reference of the messages, considering that time zone may be used to
provide an approximate indication of longitude.

One of the drivers for our analysis was also to verify if/how the mailing lists provided an evidence of the shift of development activity from the initial US-based model to Europe, rather than providing a detailed spatial distribution of the developers or the users.
This insured that simply considering the time zone reference would be an adequate proxy of location for the source of a given message.

For the grass-dev list, the results we obtained from a first pass with
the scripts developed was able to parse correctly over 99% percent of the messages.
It may be possible to obtain a greater completeness by refining the
parsing algorithm to handle exceptions encountered in the
process, but we considered the level of approximation obtained in the
extraction of the time zone reference to be adequate for the quality
objectives of our analysis.

For the grass-user mailing list, the number of messages with time zone
not identified by the first pass of the parsing algorithm is higher (some 3%), but still considered satisfactory within the scope of the current analysis.

==What do time and time zones tell==

The charts (include numbers) show:

* absolute number of message postings by time zone and year
* the relative proportion of messages posted each year from a given time zone.
* the cumulated proportion of messages deriving from different time zones, calculated assuming 100% to be the e-mail traffic generated from the beginning of the mailing list records through 2008.

(mettere qui vari spunti)

==...and what about the contents ?==

Another interesting analysis is represented by the text extraction of specific keywords from the message body. While it can be extremely intriguing to build dictionaries of words and expressions used within a mailing list, in the case of the GRASS lists, we decided to focus on GRASS commands.

Matrices with the occurrence of GRASS commands by year were generated
for both mailing lists.

The clear limitation in this type of analysis is that the use of a
term is not associated to context. Reference to a specific command may
not indicate if this is associated to a coding problem, to issues in
use, or to working examples.

Another element which is neglected in the analysis is quotation: i.e.
the occurrence of a term is counted as long as it appears in the body
of a message.

The review of the entries reported by the parser (Figures xx and yy) (DOVE CI PORTA ?)

yay... La cosa deve un po' crescere. (AL LIMITE CI LIMITIAMO A SPIEGARE CHE SIAMO CONTENTI DI AVER FATTO UNA PRIMA ESTRAZIONE...)

==Poi==
- RELEASES AND EMAIL HYPE (faccio io)
- ANNI 90: depression and renewal
- ...

GRASS mailing list community evolution

2009-03-26T21:03:02Z

⚠️Pibinko: /* ...and what about the contents ? */

=Watching how grass-dev develops (and grass-user is used)=

''DRAFT - work in progress'' - by A Giacomelli and M Neteler

==Introduction==

During the [http://gfoss2009.crs4.it/ 10th GRASS GFOSS User meeting] in Cagliari, Italy, a summary
of the activities of the Italian GFOSS community was presented.
Together with basic indicators on the activity of the Italian
community, some simple yet intriguing statistics, derived from an
analysis of the main discussion mailing lists were shown.
''(DARE DUE esempi SU QUESTO).''

In the typical brainstorming atmosphere which permits events such as
software user meetings, we considered the idea of replicating the same analysis
on two other mailing lists with a much longer history, namely the
grass developer ([http://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/grass-dev/ grass-dev]) and the grass user ([http://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/grass-user/ grass-user]) mailing lists.

The outcome of the analysis provides a unique insight on the dynamics
of the user and developer communities, over an extremely long time
span, from 1991 through 2008.

==How source data was collected==

The story of the creation of a seventeen-year long archive of communications deserves some description, as it is representative of the effort spent in maintaining a historical record of the communications within developers (and users) through various phases of the GRASS project.

SHORT STORY ABOUT LONG CONVERSATION (uh, could be better title)

* US Army mailing lists launch 12/1991
* interfaced with deja news (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deja_News) in ''(check MN)''
* Deja_News forum only ''(dovrei verificare ma ho gli mbox files delle liste, si fa preso con "mutt")''
* 1995 (?) email [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-mail_spam spam] nasce in Dejanews, carefully later polished manually from the list
* new mailing lists born in 1999 at University of Hannover as dejanews wasn't usable nor pratical ''(check MN)''
* in 2001 lists migrated to Italy with MN and server migration
* missing emails recovered from dejanews and merged into original lists mbox files (which MN received from US Army, don't remember precisely)
* All email headers for many years had to be reconstructed since their format was broken.
* complete archive restored and online ''(check date MN)''
* in 2007, lists migrated to OSGeo infrastructure

==Analysis Methodology==

The information extraction approach used leans on the KISS side: the
core of the parsing is handled by a perl script, while the remaining
post processing is carried out via standard queries and no-nonsense charting
tools.

==Time and space==

The first core set of information extracted was the time zone
reference of the messages, considering that time zone may be used to
provide an approximate indication of longitude.

One of the drivers for our analysis was also to verify if/how the mailing lists provided an evidence of the shift of development activity from the initial US-based model to Europe, rather than providing a detailed spatial distribution of the developers or the users.
This insured that simply considering the time zone reference would be an adequate proxy of location for the source of a given message.

For the grass-dev list, the results we obtained from a first pass with
the scripts developed was able to parse correctly over 99% percent of the messages.
It may be possible to obtain a greater completeness by refining the
parsing algorithm to handle exceptions encountered in the
process, but we considered the level of approximation obtained in the
extraction of the time zone reference to be adequate for the quality
objectives of our analysis.

For the grass-user mailing list, the number of messages with time zone
not identified by the first pass of the parsing algorithm is higher (some 3%), but still considered satisfactory within the scope of the current analysis.

==What do time and time zones tell==

The charts (include numbers) show:

* absolute number of message postings by time zone and year
* the relative proportion of messages posted each year from a given time zone.
* the cumulated proportion of messages deriving from different time
zones, calculated assuming 100% to be the e-mail traffic generated
from the beginning of the mailing list records through 2008.

(mettere qui vari spunti)

==...and what about the contents ?==

Another interesting analysis is represented by the text extraction of specific keywords from the message body. While it can be extremely intriguing to build dictionaries of words and expressions used within a mailing list, in the case of the GRASS lists, we decided to focus on GRASS commands.

Matrices with the occurrence of GRASS commands by year were generated
for both mailing lists.

The clear limitation in this type of analysis is that the use of a
term is not associated to context. Reference to a specific command may
not indicate if this is associated to a coding problem, to issues in
use, or to working examples.

Another element which is neglected in the analysis is quotation: i.e.
the occurrence of a term is counted as long as it appears in the body
of a message.

The review of the entries reported by the parser (Figures xx and yy) (DOVE CI PORTA ?)

yay... La cosa deve un po' crescere. (AL LIMITE CI LIMITIAMO A SPIEGARE CHE SIAMO CONTENTI DI AVER FATTO UNA PRIMA ESTRAZIONE...)

==Poi==
- RELEASES AND EMAIL HYPE (faccio io)
- ANNI 90: depression and renewal
- ...

GRASS mailing list community evolution

2009-03-18T22:13:28Z

⚠️Pibinko: first draft ag + first comments mn

=Watching how grass-dev develops (and grass-user is used)=

==Introduction==

During the 10th GRASS GFOSS User meeting in Cagliari, Italy, a summary
of the activities of the Italian GFOSS community was presented.
Together with basic indicators on the activity of the Italian
community, some simple yet intriguing statistics, derived from an
analysis of the main discussion mailing lists were shown.
(DARE DUE esempi SU QUESTO).

In the typical brainstorming atmosphere which permeates events such as
software user meetings, we considered the idea of replicating the same analysis
on two other mailing lists with a much longer history, namely the
grass developer and the grass user mailing lists.

The outcome of the analysis provides a unique insight on the dynamics
of the user and developer communities, over an extremely long time
span, from 1991 through 2008.

==How source data was collected==

The story of the creation of a seventeen-year long archive of communications deserves some description, as it is representative of the effort spent in maintaing a historical record of the communications within developers (and users) trough various phases of the GRASS project.

SHORT STORY ABOUT LONG CONVERSATION (uh, could be better)

- US Army mailing lists launch 12/1991
- interfaced with deja news (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deja_News)
in (check MN)
- Deja_News forum only (dovrei verificare ma ho gli mbox files delle liste,
si fa preso con "mutt")
- 1995 (?) email spam nasce in Dejanews
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-mail_spam),
carefully later polished manually from the list
- new mailing lists born in 1999 (check MN) at University of Hannover as
dejanews wasn't usable and pratical
- lists migrated to Italy with MN and server migration in 2001
- email recovered from dejanews and merged into original lists mbox files (which
MN received from US Army, don't remember precisely)
[we need to be vague about this because perhaps the msg copyright was with
dejanews when using their system. dejanews was then bought by Google].
All email headers for many years had to be reconstructed since the format
was broken.
- complete archive restored and online (check date MN)
- in 2007, lists migrated to OSGeo infrastructure

==Analysis Methodology==

The information extraction approach used leans on the KISS side: the
core of the parsing is handled by a perl script, while the remaining
post processing is carried out via standard queries and no-nonsense charting
tools.

==Time and space==

The first core set of information extracted was the time zone
reference of the messages, considering that time zone may be used to
provide an approximate indication of longitude.

One of the drivers for our analysis was also to verify if/how the mailing lists provided an evidence of the shift of development activity from the initial US-based model to Europe, rather than providing a detailed spatial distribution of the developers or the users.
This insured that simply considering the time zone reference would be an adequate proxy of location for the source of a given message.

For the grass-dev list, the results we obtained from a first pass with
the scripts developed was able to parse correctly over 99% percent of the messages.
It may be possible to obtain a greater completeness by refining the
parsing algorithm to handle exceptions encountered in the
process, but we considered the level of approximation obtained in the
extraction of the time zone reference to be adequate for the quality
objectives of our analysis.

For the grass-user mailing list, the number of messages with time zone
not identified by the first pass of the parsing algorithm is higher (some 3%), but still considered satisfactory within the scope of the current analysis.

==What do time and time zones tell==

The charts (include numbers) show:

* absolute number of message postings by time zone and year
* the relative proportion of messages posted each year from a given time zone.
* the cumulated proportion of messages deriving from different time
zones, calculated assuming 100% to be the e-mail traffic generated
from the beginning of the mailing list records through 2008.

(mettere qui vari spunti)

==...and what about the contents ?===

Another interesting analysis is represented by the text extraction of
specific keywords from the message body. While it can be extremely intriguing to build dictionaries of words and expressions used within a mailing list, in the case of the GRASS
lists, we decided to focus on GRASS commands.
Matrices with the occurrence of GRASS commands by year were generated
for both mailing lists.

The clear limitation in this type of analysis is that the use of a
term is not associated to context. Reference to a specific command may
not indicate if this is associated to a coding problem, to issues in
use, or to working examples.

Another element which is neglected in the analysis is quotation: i.e.
the occurrence of a term is counted as long as it appears in the body
of a message.

The review of the entries reported by the parser (Figures xx and yy) (DOVE CI PORTA ?)

yay... La cosa deve un po' crescere. (AL LIMITE CI LIMITIAMO A SPIEGARE CHE SIAMO CONTENTI DI AVER FATTO UNA PRIMA ESTRAZIONE...)

==Poi==
- RELEASES AND EMAIL HYPE (faccio io)
- ANNI 90: depression and renewal
- ...

GRASS mailing list community evolution

2009-03-18T22:03:59Z

⚠️Pibinko: New page: =Watching how grass-dev develops (and grass-user is used)= During the 10th GRASS GFOSS User meeting in Cagliari, Italy, a summary of the activities of the Italian GFOSS community was pres...

=Watching how grass-dev develops (and grass-user is used)=

During the 10th GRASS GFOSS User meeting in Cagliari, Italy, a summary
of the activities of the Italian GFOSS community was presented.
Together with basic indicators on the activity of the Italian
community, some simple yet intriguing statistics, derived from an
analysis of the main discussion mailing lists were shown.
(DARE DUE esempi SU QUESTO).

In the typical brainstorming atmosphere which permeates events such as
software user meetings, we considered the idea of replicating the same analysis
on two other mailing lists with a much longer history, namely the
grass developer and the grass user mailing lists.

The outcome of the analysis provides a unique insight on the dynamics
of the user and developer communities, over an extremely long time
span, from 1991 through 2008.

SHORT STORY ABOUT LONG CONVERSATION (uh, could be better)

- US Army mailing lists launch 12/1991
- interfaced with deja news (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deja_News)
in (check MN)
- Deja_News forum only (dovrei verificare ma ho gli mbox files delle liste,
si fa preso con "mutt")
- 1995 (?) email spam nasce in Dejanews
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-mail_spam),
carefully later polished manually from the list
- new mailing lists born in 1999 (check MN) at University of Hannover as
dejanews wasn't usable and pratical
- lists migrated to Italy with MN and server migration in 2001
- email recovered from dejanews and merged into original lists mbox files (which
MN received from US Army, don't remember precisely)
[we need to be vague about this because perhaps the msg copyright was with
dejanews when using their system. dejanews was then bought by Google].
All email headers for many years had to be reconstructed since the format
was broken.
- complete archive restored and online (check date MN)
- in 2007, lists migrated to OSGeo infrastructure

==Analysis Methodology==

The information extraction approach used leans on the KISS side: the
core of the parsing is handled by a perl script, while the remaining
post processing is carried out via standard queries and no-nonsense charting
tools.

==TIME AND SPACE==

The first core set of information extracted was the time zone
reference of the messages, considering tha time zone may be used to
provide an approximate indication of longitude.

For the grass-dev list, the results we obtained from a first pass with
the tools is able to parse correctly over 99% percent of the messages.
It may be possible to obtain a greater completeness by refining the
parsing algorithm to handle exceptions encountered in the parsing
process, but we considered the level of approximation obtained in the
extraction of the time zone reference to be adequate for the quality
objectives of our analysis.

For the grass-user mailing list, the number of messages with time zone
not identified by the first pass of the parsing algorithm is higher (some 3%), but still considered satisfactory within the scope of the current analysis.

==WHAT DO TIME AND TIME ZONES TELL==

The charts (include numbers) show:

* absolute number of message postings by time zone and year
* the relative proportion of messages posted each year from a given time zone.
* the cumulated proportion of messages deriving from different time
zones, calculated assuming 100% to be the e-mail traffic generated
from the beginning of the mailing list records through 2008.

(mettere qui vari spunti)

Another interesting analysis is represented by the text extraction of
specific keywords from the message body - in the case of the GRASS
lists, we decided to focus on GRASS commands.
Matrices with the occurrence of GRASS commands by year were generated
for both mailing lists.

The clear limitation in this type of analysis is that the use of a
term is not associated to context. Reference to a specific command may
not indicate if this is associated to a coding problem, to issues in
use, or to working examples.

Another element which is neglected in the analysis is quotation: i.e.
the occurrence of a term is counted as long as it appears in the body
of a message.

The review of the entries reported by the parser (DOVE CI PORTA ?)

yay... La cosa deve un po' crescere. (AL LIMITE CI LIMITIAMO A SPIEGARE CHE SIAMO CONTENTI DI AVER FATTO UNA PRIMA ESTRAZIONE...E CHE )

==Poi==
- RELEASES AND EMAIL HYPE (faccio io)
- ANNI 90: depression and renewal
- ...