Brenda Bushouse, public policy, and Charlie Schweik, environmental conservation and public policy, have published new articles analyzing different aspects of open source software (OSS). The research seek to deepen understanding of OSS with an eye for sustaining future development and are part of a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant titled "Jumpstarting Successful Open-Source Software Projects with Evidence-Based Rules and Structures."
The first article, coauthored by Bushouse and Schweik alongside Santiago Virguez-Ruiz, PhD candidate in political science at UMass Amherst, and Curtis Atkinson, eScience Institute, uses network analysis and qualitative cost-benefit analysis of rules to study two open source software incubator programs: The Apache Software Foundation and the OSGeo Foundation. The article, titled "Combining text-based institutional network and cost–benefit methods to advance policy design analysis: An Illustrative application to nonprofit open-source software incubation," shows how combining methodologies can result in a rigorous comparative analysis.
The second article, coauthored by Bushouse with Virguez-Ruiz, Mahasweta Chakraborti, communication at UC Davis, and Seth Frey, communication at UC Davis, uses natural language processing and Institutional Grammar to more quickly analyze laws and regulations that govern nonprofits. The article, titled "Advancing text analysis for nonprofit research: Using semantic role labeling to automate Institutional Grammar coding of nonprofit laws and policies," was previously presented at Urban Institute and the Lily School of Philanthropy’s symposium on The Future of Nonprofit Regulation in the United States, held in Washington, DC, in April 2024.