The debate on insider/outsider positionality has raised issues about the methodological advantages and liabilities between the two, yet no clear account exists for what insider scholars can expect when they enter the field. First, I conceptualize how insider positionality can dually benefit and disadvantage the insider. Using a partial review of insider studies, including my study of my multigenerational Mexican American family, I also present a practical discussion on specific insider advantages and complications. In conclusion, I present a new approach to training novice insider scholars that will help them mediate between insider perspective and researcher position, an approach that promises greater rigor to insider research that will serve the goals of qualitative research for social justice in minority and indigenous communities.

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Abstract. Agent-based software engineering has been proposed in addition to object-oriented software engineering as a means of mastering the complexity associated with the development of large-scale distributed systems. However, there is still a poor understanding of the interplay between the notions of agents and objects from a software engineering perspective. Moreover, the many facets of agent-based software engineering are rarely used in the various phases of the software development lifecycle because of the lack of a comprehensive framework to provide the software designers with a clear understanding of the use of these two key abstractions. In this context, this paper presents TAO, an evolving innovative conceptual framework based on agent and object abstractions, which are the foundations for modeling large-scale software systems. The conceptual framework allows for the characterization of largescale software systems as organizations of passive components, the objects, and autonomous components, the agents, with each of these elements playing roles to interact with each other and to coordinate their actions in order to fulfill system goals.

Abstract-A significant number of Free Software projects has been widely used and considered successful. However, there is an even larger number of them that cannot overcome the initial steps towards building an active community of users and developers. In this study, we investigated whether there are relationships between source code metrics and attractiveness, i.e., the ability of a project to attract users and developers. To verify these relationships, we analyzed 6,773 Free Software projects from the SourceForge.net repository. The results indicated that attractiveness is indeed correlated to some source code metrics. This suggests that measurable attributes of the project source code somehow affect the decision to contribute to and adopt a Free Software. The findings described in this paper show that it is relevant for project leaders to monitor source code quality, particularly a few objective metrics, since these can have a positive influence in projects chances of forming a community of contributors and users around their software, enabling further enhancement in quality.