Christian Bird: Wikis

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Biography

Born in June 1978 in Stockton, California, Bird attended public school for his primary and secondary education. His interest in computers started at an early age. He became an Eagle Scout during his high school years. While in college he began working for Caldera Linux and has since been hired by Lineo, Embedix, Motorola, and Freescale. He was married in August of 2000 and has one child. He is currently a resident of Davis, California.

Education

Bird graduated Valedictorian from Stockton's Lincoln High School in 1996. He attended Brigham Young University where he bachelor's degree in Computer Science in 2003, declining an invition to attend the prestigous Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is currently a PhD candidate at The University of California at Davis where he is researching how the many successes of the open source community can be distilled into models to improve business performance and software development processes in general.

Community Service

Bird's history of community service and charitable work are evidenced by his status as an Eagle Scout and former Mormon missionary and currently holds leadership positions in both his accademic and religous social groups.

Works

Open Source Participation

Bird has extensively contributed in the following Open Souce Software projects:

MoinMoin

PyQT

Kate

Research

Interested in software engineering and programming languages and advised by Prem Devanbu, Bird's current research involves mining and analyzing bug data, mailing list archives, and source code repository history from open source software projects. His team hopes to use social network analysis techniques to understand, among other things, how the social network structure of developers is related to the structure of the software the produce, possibly validating Conway's Law.

The group has studied several projects under a grant from the National Science Foundataion's Humanities and Social Sciences Division and has presented their findings in conferences in China and the United States. The team works with the keepers of the MARC project to gain access to the entire open source software mail archive. Most notably, the researchers have coordinated with MySQL to analyze that project after their work on PostgreSQL came to light.