  Motivation - This research aims at investigating emerging roles and forms of
participation fostering design-use mediation during the Open Source Software
design process Research approach - We compare online interactions for a
successful "pushed-by-users" design process with unsuccessful previous
proposals. The methodology developed, articulate structural analyses of the
discussions (organization of discussions, participation) to actions to the code
and documentation made by participants to the project. We focus on the
useroriented and the developer-oriented mailing-lists of the Python project.
Findings/Design - We find that key-participants, the cross-participants, foster
the design process and act as boundary spanners between the users and the
developers' communities. Research limitations/Implications - These findings can
be reinforced developing software to automate the structural analysis of
discussions and actions to the code and documentation. Further analyses,
supported by these tools, will be necessary to generalise our results.
Originality/Value - The analysis of participation among the three interaction
spaces of OSS design (discussion, documentation and implementation) is the main
originality of this work compared to other OSS research that mainly analyse one
or two spaces. Take away message - Beside the idealistic picture that users may
intervene freely in the process, OSS design is boost and framed by some
key-participants and specific rules and there can be barriers to users'
participation
