Best Practices for Managing Open Source Communities

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Community open source projects, which make up the majority of open source projects, rely on volunteer labor and need to understand how to attract, retain and motivate their volunteers. The current understanding of the practices which can be used to successfully manage volunteers in open source communities is based largely on practitioner publications. These recommendations are often anecdotal and lack scientific rigor. Meanwhile, the general volunteering literature from outside of open source contains many propositions which have not been examined in an open source context. We propose to first systematically analyze multiple sources of volunteering information and then to consolidate them as a best practice handbook. The sources are general volunteering literature, general volunteering practitioner guides, open source literature and open source practitioner guides. We will perform qualitative analysis of the sources to build our theory in the form of a best practice handbook. We will then select and validate a group of proposed best practices for open source community management. We expect to identify major gaps in the domain of episodic volunteering. Our preliminary work suggests that episodic volunteering is present in open source, but it is not addressed in the existing open source literature. Episodic volunteers are individuals who prefer short term volunteering assignments or specific tasks over a sustained commitment to a project or organization. We plan to determine how prevalent episodic volunteering is in open source communities and to derive proposed best practices for managing episodic volunteers in open source communities. Finally, we will evaluate these best practices using action research and validate them using hypothesis testing surveys.At the conclusion of this research, we expect to have: (a) created a comprehensive collection of volunteer management observations abstracted into theories of community management and expressed as a best practice handbook, (b) increased the body of knowledge on open source community management by quantifying and describing episodic volunteering, and (c) validated a group of proposed best practices of open source community management.