The goal of this Vermont Complex Systems Center project at the University of Vermont is to deepen understanding of how people, teams and organizations thrive in technology-rich settings, especially in open-source projects and communities. The Google Open-Source Programs Office, a division of Google that manages Google’s use and release of open source software and promotes open source programming, has provided the University of Vermont (UVM) Complex Systems Center a $1 million unrestricted gift to support open source research. The Google award will establish a collaboration between the Google Open Source team and UVM to begin building a community-oriented body of research focused on understanding how open source platforms are used and what makes technology-rich environments thrive.

The University of Vermont Complex Systems team has identified the initial research projects that will be conducted with the award. They include:

-How people, teams, and organizations thrive in technology-rich settings.
-Trade-offs between organizational structure and the spread of ideas and information.
-Investigating how scientists and software developers use computational and collaborative tools and platforms.
-Understanding what conditions allow individuals and communities to succeed in open source software and open science.