Research project on Open Source projects (not subscribed to the list)

[Alessandro Rizzolli]

Hi!
My name is Alessandro Rizzolli and I am a student at the University of 
Trento, Italy. Actually I am working on a research project concerning Open 
Source projects, in particular projects regarding Internet browsers.
I found your project on the Internet and I looked at your Internet site 
but, since I would like to have a deeper insight into your project, I would 
be very grateful if you could give me some additional information about the 
project history and the reasons that made you choose to start this kind of 
project.

Besides, I was wondering if you could briefly answer the following questions:
1. How many developers/project members were there at the beginning and how 
many are there now?
2. Who is the project leader? Was he/she the project leader from the 
beginning or was there a previous one?
3. How important are "face to face" interactions for the development of the 
project? Or is it mainly based on "computer mediated" relationships?
4. Is there a core team that defines specifications, requirements, 
functionalities and so forth? Or do you use a more distributed approach ("a 
la Debian", just to make an example)?

Thanks in advance for your precious help.
Alessandro Rizzolli