Background: Open Source Software (OSS) fuels our global digital infrastructure but is commonly maintained by small groups of people whose time and labor represent a depletable resource. For the OSS projects to stay sustainable, i.e., viable and maintained over time without interruption or weakening, maintenance labor requires an underlying infrastructure to be supported and secured. Aims: Using the construct of human infrastructure, our study aims to investigate how maintenance labor can be supported and secured to enable the creation and maintenance of sustainable OSS projects, viewed from the maintainers’ perspective. Method: In our exploration, we interviewed ten maintainers from nine well-adopted OSS projects. We coded the data in two steps using investigator-triangulation. Results: We constructed a framework of infrastructure design that provide insight for OSS projects in the design of their human infrastructure. The framework specifically highlight the importance of human factors, e.g., securing a work-life balance and proactively managing social pressure, toxicity, and diversity. We also note both differences and overlaps in how the infrastructure needs to support and secure maintenance labor from maintainers and the wider OSS community, respectively. Funding is specifically highlighted as an important enabler for both types of resources. Conclusions: The study contributes to the qualitative understanding of the importance, sensitivity, and risk for depletion of the maintenance labor required to build and maintain healthy OSS projects. Human infrastructure is pivotal in ensuring that maintenance labor is sustainable, and by extension the OSS projects on which we all depend.

While open source projects can benefit from usage telemetry to understand their impact, privacy concerns often arise. This paper explores using publicly available metrics as proxies for actual usage data. Using the Flutter project as a case study, we found a strong correlation between these public metrics and Flutter's active user count, demonstrating that such publicly available metrics can offer insights into project usage while respecting user privacy.

As the organizational use of open source software (OSS) increases, it requires the adjustment of organizational routines to manage new OSS risk. These routines may be influenced by community-developed open data standards to explicate, analyze, and report OSS risks. Open data standards are co-created in open communities for unifying the exchange of information. The SPDX® specification is such an open data standard to explicate and share OSS risk information. The development and subsequent adoption of SPDX raises the questions of how organizations make sense of SPDX when improving their own risk management routines, and of how a community benefits from the experiential knowledge that is contributed back by organizational adopters. To explore these questions, we conducted a single case, multi-component field study, connecting with members of organizations that employed SPDX. The results of this study contribute to understanding the development and adoption of open data standards within open source environments.

The rapid acceleration of corporate engagement with open source projects is drawing out new ways for CSCW researchers to consider the dynamics of these projects. Research must now consider the complex ecosystems within which open source projects are situated, including issues of for-profit motivations, brokering foundations, and corporate collaboration. Localized project considerations cannot reveal broader workings of an open source ecosystem, yet much empirical work is constrained to a local context. In response, we present eight observations from our eight-year engaged field study about the changing nature of open source projects. We ground these observations through 24 research questions that serve as primers to spark research ideas in this new reality of open source projects. This paper contributes to CSCW in social and crowd computing by delivering a rich and fresh look at corporately-engaged open source projects with a call for renewed focus and research into newly emergent areas of interest.

Organizations increasingly engage with open source communities. Extant research identified the benefits to organizations for engaging with open source and documented how open source communities operate to accommodate organizational engagement. The complexities involved in what attracts organizations to specific communities, how they choose to engage, and how subsequently the organizational-communal engagement shapes the community and organization are not yet well understood. In this paper, we explore how the Attraction-Selection-Attrition Model supports the study of how communities attract, retain, and lose members, and how these aspects relate to organizational-communal engagement between organizations and open source communities. This conceptual paper provides an introduction to the ASA model, having briefly outlined the lack of research connecting ASA and open source communities. Following this, the paper outlines how existing research related to the ASA model may be effectively related to existing open source research, resulting in several questions for future research.