Comment by dmitryminkovsky
4 years ago
Yeah this actually seems more like sociological research except since it’s in the comp sci department the investigators don’t seem to be trained in acceptable (and legal) standards of conducting such research on human subjects. You definitely need prior consent when doing this sort of thing. Ideally this would be escalated to a research ethics committee at UMN because these researchers need to be trained in acceptable practices when dealing with human subjects. So to me it makes sense the subjects “opted out” and escalated to the university.
Already cited in another comment:
> We send the emails to the Linux communityand seek their feedback. The experiment is not to blame any maintainers but to reveal issues in the process. The IRB of University of Minnesota reviewed the procedures of the experiment and determined that this is not human research. We obtained a formal IRB-exempt letter. The experiment will not collect any personal data, individual behaviors, or personal opinions. It is limited to studying the patching process OSS communities follow, instead of individuals.
So they did think of that. Either they misconstrued their research or the IRB messed up. Either way, they can now see for themselves exactly how human a pissed off maintainer is.
how is this not experimentation on humans? "can we trick this human" is the entire experiment.