GCR: Collaborative Research: Jumpstarting Successful Open-Source Software Projects With Evidence-Based Rules and Structures

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Open Source Software (OSS) is a multi-billion dollar industry. Over 80% of businesses, including all major tech companies, rely on OSS. In fact, such software is used in many aspects of digital life, e.g., browsing the social web, document editing, banking, website hosting, etc. Even though this popularity attracts many programmers to open source, more than 90% of OSS projects are abandoned, especially the smaller and younger projects. Prior work has looked at the reasons for this in two very different fields. In software engineering, the focus has been on understanding success and sustainability from the socio-technical perspective: the OSS programmers’ day to day activities and the artifacts they create. In the organizational management/policy literature, on the other hand, emphasis has been on institutional designs (e.g., policies, rules, and norms) that structure governance. But the connection and interaction between the two has been barely explored. In this project, a convergent research team comprised of experts in empirical data science and software engineering, cognitive science, political science, and public policy will develop a convergent analysis framework that unifies the socio-technical task structure of OSS projects with their governance and institutional design, in order to understand if projects, especially nascent ones, are likely to be successful and self-sustaining. The team will focus on nonprofit-supported projects, like those under the Apache Software Foundation, and will actively engage the open-source communities throughout the project, both to inform the research and to explore applications and results. The proposed work will advance the theory and practice of software engineering, especially as it relates to understanding success and effectiveness of OSS projects, goals that are critical to national competitiveness. The primary broader impact of the project lies in its potential to strengthen a technology that has become woven into the fabric of society. In this project, the convergence perspective is a unified framework, fusing the socio-technical structure and project governance. The team posits that trajectories of individual OSS projects can be understood in that framework through the context provided by similar projects that already have succeeded or been abandoned. This research will combine established and novel qualitative and quantitative techniques to discern the socio-technical structural and governance conditions under which OSS projects are most (and least) effective, and provide actionable knowledge to developers, to customize efficient project practices to their environment. The intellectual challenges lie both in these areas as well as in the integration of these with the scattered literature from software engineering, management and policy.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.