Users' Participation to the Design Process in an Open Source Software Online Community

The objective of this research is to analyze the ways members of open-source software communities participate in design. In particular the authors focus on how users of an Open Source (OS) programming language (Python) participate in adding new functionalities to the language. Indeed, in the OS communities, users are highly skilled in computer sciences; they do not correspond to the common representation of end-users and can potentially participate to the design process. The study characterizes the Python galaxy and analyses a formal process to introduce new functionalities to the language called Python Enhancement Proposal (PEP) from the idea of language evolution to the PEP implementation.