Motivation

BigBang was originally designed to study communities developing open sources scientific software. It was quickly thereafter adopted by researchers studying Internet and network standards-setting. Organizations such as the IETF conduct much of their technical work via open mailing list and document records. There is tremendous opportunity to learn from these data sources. BigBang codifies the processes of collecting and cleaning that data, making it available to researchers.

More broadly, BigBang is designed to give researchers and students more transparent insight into the sociotechnical governance and infrastructure processes that shape their world. BigBang is a telescope designed to study the originating singularities that gave rise to the Internet, scientific computation, and other pivotal technological developments.

License

BigBang is open source software. It is released under the MIT license.