Free Software Case Studies/Prioritise

How may Free Software Case Studies be prioritised? First, be clear about the reason for prioritising. In this case, it is to decide which ones to use in a particular module for students to learn from the real world experience of others. Please add criteria for selection and/or evaluation below.

While designing a module to share real world experience with free software, educators need to select from a plethora of case studies or have their students do so. This page is intended to help with that process which will most likely be qualitative.

Criteria for Case Study Selection

 * 1) Context and relevance
 * 2) Previous familiarity with the case
 * 3) * In general, time is limited and the process of adapting case studies for/by learners needs to be optimised or streamlined. The more one knows in advance, the easier it is to develop and adapt.
 * 4) Access to and availability of relevant people and information
 * 5) * Case studies require deep insight and access to tacit knowledge
 * 6) ** Willing collaborators
 * 7) * Quality and completeness of existing information
 * 8) ** Currency (is it up to date)
 * 9) Personal appeal
 * 10) * Educators and learners tend to produce better results when working on something which appeals to them. For example, free software used in a project which is inspirational irrespective of the software being used.
 * 11) Size/scale/complexity
 * 12) * The amount of work required to develop/adapt the case study
 * 13) Learning value
 * 14) * Depending on learning objectives, look for case studies which highlight best practices and things to avoid.
 * 15) ** Some "failure stories" may have a higher learning value than success stories, and are harder to find.
 * 16) Please add/edit ...

Processes
The following are "quick and dirty" approaches. If more rigour is required, explore (for example) Multi-criteria decision making techniques.

For Individuals

 * 1) Tabulate the candidate case studies and allocate a score to selected criteria (e.g. from those above). Sum the scores and consider using the one(s) with the highest total(s).
 * 2) * Consider weighting the criteria and multiply each score by the weight.
 * 3) * Sometimes, there can be overriding criteria which (for example) rule out a case study immediately.

For Teams
If a team of people need to decide, try the following.


 * 1) Tabulate the candidate case studies and have each member allocate a score to selected criteria (e.g. from those above). Take the mean score from each participant and select the one(s) with the highest total score(s).
 * 2) * Consider weighting the criteria
 * 3) * Sometimes, there can be overriding criteria which (for example) rule out a case study immediately.
 * 4) For more rigour, as above, find an appropriate Multi-criteria decision making technique.