Attracting and Retaining OSS Contributors with a Maintainer Dashboard

Abstract

Tools and artifacts produced by open source software (OSS) have been woven into the foundation of the technology industry. To keep this foundation intact, the open source community needs to actively invest in sustainable approaches to bring in new contributors and nurture existing ones. We take a first step at this by collaboratively designing a maintainer dashboard that provides recommendations on how to attract and retain open source contributors. For example, by highlighting project goals (e.g., a social good cause) to attract diverse contributors and mechanisms to acknowledge (e.g., a "rising contributor" badge) existing contributors. Next, we conduct a project-specific evaluation with maintainers to better understand use cases in which this tool will be most helpful at supporting their plans for growth. From analyzing feedback, we find recommendations to be useful at signaling projects as welcoming and providing gentle nudges for maintainers to proactively recognize emerging contributors. However, there are complexities to consider when designing recommendations such as the project current development state (e.g., deadlines, milestones, refactoring) and governance model. Finally, we distill our findings to share what the future of recommendations in open source looks like and how to make these recommendations most meaningful over time.

Looking for related discussions on GitHub Discussions

“…Identifying related threads can help users find previous posts already asked and answered, reducing the waste of time while waiting for feedback (Ahasanuzzaman et al, 2016) and the fear of submitting duplicates (Ford et al, 2016). It also helps to suggest related posts before creating a new thread (Zhang et al, 2017), assisting users to find posts with similar issues (Ahasanuzzaman et al, 2016;Zhang et al, 2017), helping new users asking better questions (Ford et al, 2018), and reducing the manual responsibility of maintainers to sustain a healthy community (Guizani et al, 2022). Besides, every online community depends on volunteer activity, so it is essential to attract and retain new members to guarantee community sustainability (Cho and Wash, 2021;Guizani et al, 2022).…”

“…It also helps to suggest related posts before creating a new thread (Zhang et al, 2017), assisting users to find posts with similar issues (Ahasanuzzaman et al, 2016;Zhang et al, 2017), helping new users asking better questions (Ford et al, 2018), and reducing the manual responsibility of maintainers to sustain a healthy community (Guizani et al, 2022). Besides, every online community depends on volunteer activity, so it is essential to attract and retain new members to guarantee community sustainability (Cho and Wash, 2021;Guizani et al, 2022). However, it is well-known that newcomers face barriers to onboard to OSS communities (Steinmacher et al, 2015).…”

“…OSS Maintainers: previous research report that OSS maintainers need to manage multiple aspects of the project to ensure that the project vision endures (Guizani et al, 2022) and the projects' long-term sustainability (Dias et al, 2021). To do so, maintainers' perform different activities encompassing code and noncoding tasks (Dias et al, 2021;Trinkenreich et al, 2021).…”

A Retrospective on ICSE 2022

“…On a similar note, positively welcoming newcomers into such OSS projects is very important. Guizani et al has worked on creating a maintainer dashboard that works to attract and retain new contributors by highlighting achievements of contributors encouraging maintainers to recognize new contributors [9]. Currently, many GitHub repositories have bots for pull requests.…”