Hidden Figures: Roles and Pathways of Successful OSS Contributors
Hidden Figures: Roles and Pathways of Successful OSS Contributors
复制标题
DOI：
10.1145/3415251
复制
发表时间：
2020-10
影响因子：
--
通讯作者：
Bianca Trinkenreich;M. Guizani;I. Wiese;A. Sarma;Igor Steinmacher
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Bianca Trinkenreich;M. Guizani;I. Wiese;A. Sarma;Igor Steinmacher
开放源码软件（OSS）开发是一项协作奋进，分布在地球仪各地的专家开发人员创建软件解决方案。鉴于这一特点，开放源码软件社区被视为技术社区，利益相关者根据他们对项目的代码贡献（通常是自愿的）加入并发展他们的职业生涯。然而，随着越来越多的人和公司参与OSS，OSS的格局正在慢慢改变。这意味着项目现在需要非技术角色和活动的人员来保持项目的可持续性和发展。在本文中，我们专注于了解当前OSS景观的一部分的角色和活动，以及OSS中不同的职业道路。通过对17位社区知名OSS贡献者的访谈，我们提供了经验证据，证明了除了以项目为中心的角色（如维护者、核心成员）之外，以社区为中心的角色（如倡导者、许可证管理者、社区创始人）的存在和重要性。然而，以社区为中心的角色通常保持隐藏，因为这些角色可能不会在研究人员通常分析的软件存储库中留下痕迹。我们发现，人们可以通过不同的角色和活动在OSS中建立职业生涯，具有不同的背景，包括那些与编写软件无关的人。此外，人们的职业道路是流动的，在项目和以社区为中心的角色之间移动。我们的工作强调，社区和研究人员需要采取行动，承认这些不同角色的重要性，使这些角色可见并得到认可，这最终有助于吸引和留住更多的人参与OSS项目。
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.