Dear Sir or Madam
I kindly want to invite you to our project's upcoming study on community governance and its impact on the collaboration with other organizations. Given the recent developments between the OpenOffice.org (respectively LibreOffice) community on the one hand and Oracle/Sun on the other hand, it seems that your insight will be most important to our research project.
Please let me briefly introduce you to our project and myself. My dissertation is concerned with the opportunities and challenges, which arise from open source development. Based on this, my team and I have launched a project at the Berlin Institute of Technology, which also involves other researchers and students. Just recently we have also launched our website: www.oss-research.info.
In this next study of ours we want to explore what are the basic elements of community governance, how a community can be managed and what rules and norms are vital for the collaboration with other organizations. This is a topic, which is pretty much understudied right now and as you will be aware yourself, managers have to learn how to acknowledge community culture. For this reason I ask for your support. We would be glad if you consider to participate in our study by agreeing to an interview (via skype). Of course, all answers will be anonymized from individual attribution, unless you don't want that. And likewise, we offer to give you a full account of our research findings.
If you are interested, please contact me at heitmann@strategie.tu-berlin.de
Thanks in advance for your support.
Best regards
Martin Heitmann