Free/Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS) communities are composed, in part, of volunteers, many of whom contribute infrequently. However, these infrequent volunteers contribute to the sustainability of FLOSS projects, and should ideally be encouraged to continue participating, even if they cannot be persuaded to contribute regularly. Infrequent contributions are part of a trend which has been widely observed in other sectors of volunteering, where it has been termed "episodic volunteering" (EV). Previous FLOSS research has focused on the Onion model, differentiating core and peripheral developers, with the latter considered as a homogeneous group. We argue this is too simplistic, given the size of the periphery group and the myriad of valuable activities they perform beyond coding. Our exploratory qualitative survey of 13 FLOSS communities investigated what episodic volunteering looks like in a FLOSS context. EV is widespread in FLOSS communities, although not specifically managed. We suggest several recommendations for managing EV based on a framework drawn from the volunteering literature. Also, episodic volunteers make a wide range of value-added contributions other than code, and they should neither be expected nor coerced into becoming habitual volunteers.

Table 1 details our study participants by country of origin, country of residence, and the contribution types they engage in. APPENDIX B DESCRIPTION OF COMMUNITIES REPRESENTED We include a brief description of the communities our participants are engaged in, which are listed in alphabetical order. B.1 Anonymous community CM 1 preferred not to have their community named. The project was initiated in 2000. It has a well-established codebase which is licensed under GPL v3, consisting of more than 30,000 commits made by about 200 developers. New stable releases are made twice a year. The project's primary programming language is Perl.

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