The challenge in studying Open Source (OS) participation is the lack of a clear conceptual framework that connects with a virtual community. This has resulted in fragmented and speculative research that has not thoroughly addressed participation in a comprehensive and empirical manner. A difficulty in researching a virtual community is that participants are geographically spread and primarily communicate online. Participants connect via mailing lists, wikis and forums, which are not generally available to everyone. As a consequence, this makes the population difficult to study as we know very little about the participants or the most appropriate research methodology to use.

To overcome these difficulties an extensive literature review was undertaken which developed a theoretical framework. The research questions examined a number of areas (what the population is like, what motivates the members and how the community/population is structured). To comprehensively investigate a multi-mode study was designed comprising of a self-designed on-line survey and social network analysis. To attract the most participants for the online survey, a request was sent to 180 online OS discussion boards to apply for online membership. This was necessary as you are unable to post a message without becoming a member. As a result, membership was approved on 160 boards. A message was posted on each of the discussion boards explaining the survey and requesting participants. With sustained and direct communication with members from the online discussion boards, the survey was further promoted amongst the community by the members themselves. Over a 10 months period a total of 1654 valid responses were received.

The second component involved the use of Network analysis. The discussion posts from the online OS discussion boards formed the primary data. Network studies can use a substantial amount of information residing in archives. Such data provides unobtrusive measures of social ties without using obtrusive techniques. The data used consisted of the archival information taken over a twelve-month period which was then analysed to gain a greater understanding of the structure of the community.
Overall the methodology provided a theoretical framework which increased the ability to investigate virtual communities. The significant findings of the research found that participants in the OS community tend to join because they need something, but continue with their participation (become committed) due to the reciprocal benefits received.