No abstract

Open Source Software (OSS) development is a collaborative endeavor where expert developers, distributed around the globe create software solutions. Given this characteristic, OSS communities have been studied as technical communities, where stakeholders join and evolve in their careers based on their (often voluntary) code contributions to the project. However, the OSS landscape is slowly changing with more people and companies getting involved in OSS. This means that projects now need people in non-technical roles and activities to keep the project sustainable and evolving. In this paper, we focus on understanding the roles and activities that are part of the current OSS landscape and the different career pathways in OSS. By conducting and analyzing 17 interviews with OSS contributors who are well known in the community, we provide empirical evidence of the existence and importance of community-centric roles (e.g advocate, license manager, community founder) in addition to the well-known project-centric ones (e.g maintainer, core member). However, the community-centric roles typically remain hidden, since these roles may not leave traces in software repositories typically analyzed by researchers. We found that people can build a career in OSS through different roles and activities, with different backgrounds, including those not related to writing software. Furthermore, people's career pathways are fluid, moving between project and community-centric roles. Our work highlights that communities and researchers need to take action to acknowledge the importance of these varied roles, making these roles visible and well-recognized, which can ultimately help attract and retain more people in the OSS projects.

Open Source Software (OSS) has changed drastically over the last decade, with OSS projects now producing a large ecosystem of popular products, involving industry participation, and providing professional career opportunities. But our field's understanding of what motivates people to contribute to OSS is still fundamentally grounded in studies from the early 2000s. With the changed landscape of OSS, it is very likely that motivations to join OSS have also evolved. Through a survey of 242 OSS contributors, we investigate shifts in motivation from three perspectives: (1) the impact of the new OSS landscape, (2) the impact of individuals' personal growth as they become part of OSS communities, and (3) the impact of differences in individuals' demographics. Our results show that some motivations related to social aspects and reputation increased in frequency and that some intrinsic and internalized motivations, such as learning and intellectual stimulation, are still highly relevant. We also found that contributing to OSS often transforms extrinsic motivations to intrinsic, and that while experienced contributors often shift toward altruism, novices often shift toward career, fun, kinship, and learning. OSS projects can leverage our results to revisit current strategies to attract and retain contributors, and researchers and tool builders can better support the design of new studies and tools to engage and support OSS development.

Many developers rely on modern news aggregator sites such as Reddit and Hacker News to stay up to date with the latest technological developments and trends. In order to understand what motivates developers to contribute, what kind of content is shared, and how knowledge is shaped by the community, we interviewed and surveyed developers that participate on the Reddit programming subreddit and we analyzed a sample of posts on both Reddit and Hacker News. We learned what kind of content is shared in these websites and developer motivations for posting, sharing, discussing, evaluating, and aggregating knowledge on these aggregators, while revealing challenges developers face in terms of how content and participant behavior is moderated. Our insights aim to improve the practices developers follow when using news aggregators, as well as guide tool makers on how to improve their tools. Our indings are also relevant to researchers that study developer communities of practice.

No abstract

While onboarding an open source software (OSS) project, contributors face many different barriers that hinder their contribution, leading in many cases to dropouts. Many projects leverage the contribution of outsiders and the sustainability of the project relies on retaining some of these newcomers. In this paper, we discuss some barriers faced by newcomers to OSS. The barriers were identified using a qualitative analysis on data obtained from newcomers and members of OSS projects. We organize the results in a conceptual model composed of 38 barriers, grouped into seven different categories. These barriers may motivate new studies and the development of appropriate tooling to better support the onboarding of new developers.

No abstract

Open Source Software projects success depends on the continuous influx of newcomers and their contributions. Newcomers play an important role as they are the potential future developers, but they face difficulties and obstacles when initiating their interaction with a project, resulting in a high amount of withdrawals. This paper presents a recommendation system aiming to support newcomers finding the most appropriate project member to mentor them in a technical task. The proposed system uses temporal and social aspects of developer's behavior, in addition to recent contextual information to recommend the most suitable mentor at the moment.