Tibor Udvari
What are the dynamics that lead to the creation of a community around a piece of software? How do these dynamics influence the development of the software itself? This thesis explores these questions through the lens of the Processing community, a community of artists and designers who use the Processing software to create interactive art. The paper traces the history of the Processing community from its beginnings in 2001 to the present day, employing a combination of interviews, archival research, and analysis of the software development cycle itself. Key findings include the influence of the community's shared history and values on the software's design. The paper concludes by discussing the implications of these findings for the development of collaborative open source art software.
This repository hosts the Master's thesis by Tibor Udvari in Media Design at HEAD Geneva. The research aims to explore the formation and impact of Free/Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS) communities, focusing on the Processing project—an open-source toolkit for the arts.
The research adopts a multi-pronged approach:
- Archival Research: A study of the community's initial forums and additional archival materials.
- Software Development Cycle Analysis: Quantitative and qualitative analysis of the codebase's development history.
- Interviews: Conducted with key contributors to the Processing project, including founders, frequent contributors, and community members.
data: Contains Jupyter notebooks that were used to collect and preprocess the data for the thesis.output: Includes all LaTeX files necessary to compile the thesis into a PDF.README.md: This README file, providing an overview of the project and its structure.
- Observable collection: This is a collection of visualizations generated from the dataset.
- HuggingFace Dataset: The dataset is hosted on HuggingFace as the file sizes became too large for Github.