TY - JOUR
T1 - Hidden Figures
T2 - Roles and Pathways of Successful OSS Contributors
AU - Trinkenreich, Bianca
AU - Guizani, Mariam
AU - Wiese, Igor
AU - Sarma, Anita
AU - Steinmacher, Igor
N1 - Funding Information:
We thank all the interviewees for their time and the insights. This work is partially supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant Numbers 1815486, 1815503, 1900903, and 1901031.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2020 ACM.
PY - 2020/10/14
Y1 - 2020/10/14
N2 - Open Source Software (OSS) development is a collaborative endeavor where expert developers, distributed around the globe create software solutions. Given this characteristic, OSS communities have been studied as technical communities, where stakeholders join and evolve in their careers based on their (often voluntary) code contributions to the project. However, the OSS landscape is slowly changing with more people and companies getting involved in OSS. This means that projects now need people in non-technical roles and activities to keep the project sustainable and evolving. In this paper, we focus on understanding the roles and activities that are part of the current OSS landscape and the different career pathways in OSS. By conducting and analyzing 17 interviews with OSS contributors who are well known in the community, we provide empirical evidence of the existence and importance of community-centric roles (e.g advocate, license manager, community founder) in addition to the well-known project-centric ones (e.g maintainer, core member). However, the community-centric roles typically remain hidden, since these roles may not leave traces in software repositories typically analyzed by researchers. We found that people can build a career in OSS through different roles and activities, with different backgrounds, including those not related to writing software. Furthermore, people's career pathways are fluid, moving between project and community-centric roles. Our work highlights that communities and researchers need to take action to acknowledge the importance of these varied roles, making these roles visible and well-recognized, which can ultimately help attract and retain more people in the OSS projects.
AB - Open Source Software (OSS) development is a collaborative endeavor where expert developers, distributed around the globe create software solutions. Given this characteristic, OSS communities have been studied as technical communities, where stakeholders join and evolve in their careers based on their (often voluntary) code contributions to the project. However, the OSS landscape is slowly changing with more people and companies getting involved in OSS. This means that projects now need people in non-technical roles and activities to keep the project sustainable and evolving. In this paper, we focus on understanding the roles and activities that are part of the current OSS landscape and the different career pathways in OSS. By conducting and analyzing 17 interviews with OSS contributors who are well known in the community, we provide empirical evidence of the existence and importance of community-centric roles (e.g advocate, license manager, community founder) in addition to the well-known project-centric ones (e.g maintainer, core member). However, the community-centric roles typically remain hidden, since these roles may not leave traces in software repositories typically analyzed by researchers. We found that people can build a career in OSS through different roles and activities, with different backgrounds, including those not related to writing software. Furthermore, people's career pathways are fluid, moving between project and community-centric roles. Our work highlights that communities and researchers need to take action to acknowledge the importance of these varied roles, making these roles visible and well-recognized, which can ultimately help attract and retain more people in the OSS projects.
KW - career
KW - collaborative development
KW - open-source
KW - role
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UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85094204872&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1145/3415251
DO - 10.1145/3415251
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85094204872
SN - 2573-0142
VL - 4
JO - Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction
JF - Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction
IS - CSCW2
M1 - 180
ER -