Attracting and retaining OSS contributors with a maintainer dashboard
Attracting and retaining OSS contributors with a maintainer dashboard
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通过维护者仪表板吸引和留住 OSS 贡献者
DOI：
10.1145/3510458.3513020
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发表时间：
2022
期刊：
影响因子：
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通讯作者：
Ford, Denae
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
Guizani, Mariam;Zimmermann, Thomas;Sarma, Anita;Ford, Denae
由开放源码软件(OSS)生产的工具和制品已经编织成技术行业的基础。为了保持这个基础的完好无损，开源社区需要积极投资于可持续的方法，以引入新的贡献者并培育现有的贡献者。我们在这方面迈出了第一步，合作设计了一个维护者仪表板，提供了如何吸引和留住开源贡献者的建议。例如，通过突出项目目标(例如，社会公益事业)来吸引不同的贡献者，并建立机制来表彰(例如，“上升贡献者”徽章)现有的贡献者。接下来，我们与维护人员一起进行特定于项目的评估，以更好地了解该工具最有助于支持他们的增长计划的用例。通过分析反馈，我们发现建议在发出项目信号时是有用的，因为它欢迎并温和地推动维护人员主动识别新的贡献者。然而，在设计诸如项目当前开发状态(例如，最后期限、里程碑、重构)和治理模型等建议时，需要考虑复杂性。最后，我们提炼我们的发现，以分享开源建议的未来是什么样子，以及如何使这些建议随着时间的推移而变得最有意义。开源软件(OSS)在软件产品的开发和维护中发挥着重要作用，这些产品广泛部署在从计算机科学到天体物理学和尖端医学研究的不同领域。有可能会有一个开放源码项目供任何人参与。随着最近流行的Linux开源项目在火星上的部署，就连天空都是没有限制的。然而，开放源码软件项目在很大程度上依赖于志愿者，吸引、留住和保持贡献者的参与度是一个严峻的挑战。在这篇文章中，我们提出了一个仪表板的设计和评估，以支持社区管理人员，如维护人员，跟踪和承认新来者的贡献。在我们这样的工具的支持下，维护人员将更好地准备好吸引和留住他们的新兴社区。
Tools and artifacts produced by open source software (OSS) have been woven into the foundation of the technology industry. To keep this foundation intact, the open source community needs to actively invest in sustainable approaches to bring in new contributors and nurture existing ones. We take a first step at this by collaboratively designing a maintainer dashboard that provides recommendations on how toattractandretainopen source contributors. For example, by highlighting project goals (e.g., a social good cause) to attract diverse contributors and mechanisms to acknowledge (e.g., a "rising contributor" badge) existing contributors. Next, we conduct a project-specific evaluation with maintainers to better understand use cases in which this tool will be most helpful at supporting their plans for growth. From analyzing feedback, we find recommendations to be useful at signaling projects as welcoming and providing gentle nudges for maintainers to proactively recognize emerging contributors. However, there are complexities to consider when designing recommendations such as the project current development state (e.g., deadlines, milestones, refactoring) and governance model. Finally, we distill our findings to share what the future of recommendations in open source looks like and how to make these recommendations most meaningful over time.Open Source Software (OSS) plays an important role in the development and maintenance of software products that are widely deployed in different domains from computer science to astrophysics and cutting edge medicines research. Chances are there is an open source project for anyone to contribute to. With the recent deployment of the popular Linux open source project on Mars even the sky is no limit. However, OSS projects largely depend on volunteers and attracting, retaining, and keeping contributors engaged is a severe challenge. In this paper, we present the design and evaluation of a dashboard to support community managers, such as maintainers, to track and acknowledge newcomers' contributions. With the support of tools such as ours, maintainers will be better prepared to attract and retain their emerging community.