Presentations

Upcoming Research Presentation on Facilitating Sustained Contributions to Open Source Software Communities

(Image source: Pexel)

I am looking forward to traveling to the School of Management at Bocconi University in Milan, Italy to present my research on facilitating sustained contributions to open source software (OSS) communities. The OSS model for developing software has come into the mainstream and there has been an explosion of OSS projects. While this has generally been viewed as a welcome development, it has also created some unanticipated challenges. One of the big challenges for OSS communities is that sustaining the contributions of developers has become increasingly difficult as the number of projects increases. Developers have many more avenues for making contributions and they can quite easily leave a project and devote their attention elsewhere. Consequently, in many OSS communities, developer make  one contribution before moving on to another project. This makes it difficult to sustain code contributions over time in the form of new features, feature enhancement, bug fixing, etc. Consequently, as this article from opensource.com  , the interest of community managers has now shifted from attracting developers to converting them into longer term contributors. The research that I will present reflects some our findings about what it is about OSS communities that promotes such sustained code contributions.