Under the label of Research Room @ FOSDEM: Libre software communities meet research community, several topics related to research on free software projects will be discussed. Among them, the probably intrusive nature of field studies on SVN and mail archives will be highlighted in the quest for a solution. Submissions for talks will be accepted until January 24, 2008.
Research Room @ FOSDEM website
Our friends over at GNOME Academic have additional interesting links between free desktop development and academic research.
People interested in KDE Research met with a guest in Nijmegen, The Netherlands to discuss ideas and structure for the team.
KDE TechBase 