Best Practices for Managing Open Source Communities

社区开源项目占开源项目的大部分，依赖于志愿者劳动，需要了解如何吸引、留住和激励他们的志愿者。目前对可用于成功管理开源社区中的志愿者的做法的理解主要基于从业者的出版物。这些建议往往是轶事，缺乏科学严谨性。同时，来自开放源码之外的一般志愿服务文献包含许多在开放源码环境中没有被研究过的主张。我们建议首先系统地分析志愿服务信息的多种来源，然后将其合并为一本最佳做法手册。来源是一般志愿服务文献、一般志愿服务从业者指南、开放源码文献和开放源码从业者指南。我们将对来源进行定性分析，以最佳实践手册的形式建立我们的理论。然后，我们将选择并验证一组建议的开源社区管理最佳实践。我们希望找出间歇性志愿服务领域的主要差距。我们的初步工作表明，时断时续的志愿服务存在于开源中，但在现有的开源文献中没有涉及到这一点。间歇性志愿者是指喜欢短期志愿任务或特定任务，而不是对项目或组织的持续承诺的个人。我们计划确定插曲志愿者在开源社区中的流行程度，并得出建议的最佳实践，以管理开源社区中的插曲志愿者。最后，我们将使用行动研究对这些最佳实践进行评估，并使用假设检验调查对其进行验证。在本研究结束时，我们希望：(A)创建一个全面的志愿者管理观察集合，将其抽象为社区管理理论并表示为最佳实践手册；(B)通过量化和描述时段性志愿服务，增加关于开源社区管理的知识体系；以及(C)验证一组建议的开源社区管理最佳实践。

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.