Leaving My Fingerprints: Motivations and Challenges of Contributing to OSS for Social Good

Abstract

When inspiring software developers to contribute to open source software, the act is often referenced as an opportunity to build tools to support the developer community. However, that is not the only charge that propels contributionsgrowing interest in open source has also been attributed to software developers deciding to use their technical skills to benefit a common societal good. To understand how developers identify these projects, their motivations for contributing, and challenges they face, we conducted 21 semi-structured interviews with OSS for Social Good (OSS4SG) contributors. From our interview analysis, we identified themes of contribution styles that we wanted to understand at scale by deploying a survey to over 5765 OSS and Open Source Software for Social Good contributors. From our quantitative analysis of 517 responses, we find that the majority of contributors demonstrate a distinction between OSS4SG and OSS. Likewise, contributors described definitions based on what societal issue the project was to mitigate and who the outcomes of the project were going to benefit. In addition, we find that OSS4SG contributors focus less on benefiting themselves by padding their resume with new technology skills and are more interested in leaving their mark on society at statistically significant levels. We also find that OSS4SG contributors evaluate the owners of the project significantly more than OSS contributors. These findings inform implications to help contributors identify high societal impact projects, help project maintainers reduce barriers to entry, and help organizations understand why contributors are drawn to these projects to sustain active participation.

Hashing It Out: A Survey of Programmers' Cannabis Usage, Perception, and Motivation

“…Using regular expressions and manual review, we identified 7,372 with a US location. Eliminating an additional 1,613 using DNS verification, we sent 5,759 emails, of which 36 failed, and received 440 valid responses (7.7%), a rate similar to previous studies of open-source developers [29,53]. This use of GitHub profiles for research is permitted by the terms of service.…”

Attracting and Retaining OSS Contributors with a Maintainer Dashboard

“…To understand the usefulness of these recommendations, we conducted project-specific interviews with maintainers from open source for social good (OSS4SG) projects. We used OSS4SG projects (and their maintainers) for our evaluation, as prior work found that OSS4G projects attract contributors who are interested in a broader impact [13]-which is well-aligned with our project growth recommendation. Additionally, as these projects also tend to attract contributors from minority groups, they provided a good opportunity for us to recruit participants from diverse backgrounds.…”

“…Second, we detected the presence (or lack of) newcomer-friendly issues by analyzing the issue tracker data to identify the state of newcomer-friendly issues in the project in order to recommend adding newcomer-friendly issue labels (see Figure 2(a)). Third, we identified the OSS4SG goal(s) that were aligned with the project to recommend the accurate project growth badge(s) [13].…”

“…To recruit participants, we randomly selected 71 projects from the list of 434 OSS4SG projects [13] where the project still existed on GitHub and where we could run the community growth recommendation. For instance, if a project did not have newcomers activity in the last six months it was not selected.…”

“…Santos et al [20] provided an approach to automatically identify the skills needed for an OSS tasks, which could then be used to label issues. On the other hand, Huang et al [13] have shown that certain project topics, especially those that relate to social good help in attracting a diverse set of contributors. Other works have shown the benefit of badges as an attractor for projects [19,30].…”