Discussions about project values are important for engineering software that meets diverse human needs and positively impacts society. Because value-related discussions involve deeply held beliefs, they can lead to conflicts or other outcomes that may affect motivations to continue contributing to open source projects. However, it is unclear what kind of value-related discussions are associated with significant changes in turnover. We address this gap by identifying discussions related to important project values and investigating the extent to which those discussions predict project turnover in the following months. We collected logs of GitHub issues and commits from 52 projects that share similar ethical commitments and were identified as part of the DWeb (Decentralized Web) community. We identify issues related to DWeb's core values of respectfulness, freedom, broadmindedness, opposing centralized social power, equity & equality, and protecting the environment. We then use Granger causality analysis to examine how changes in the proportion of discussions related to those values might predict changes in incoming and outgoing turnover. We found multiple significant relationships between value-related discussions and turnover, including that discussions about respectfulness predict an increase in contributors leaving and a decrease in new contributors, while discussions about social power predicted better contributor retention. Understanding these antecedents of contributor turnover is important for managing open source projects that incorporate human-centric issues. Based on the results, we discuss implications for open source maintainers and for future research.

Communication technologies have significant social impacts, and it is important to consider how designers' and developers' values shape their design. Increasingly, these technologies are released as continually evolving platforms and services, so their development involves ongoing discussions and debates about unforeseen problems and future directions. However, there is a gap in research about how designers, developers, and other stakeholders engage with values during later stages of development. We investigate discussions about values in the context of open source software development, focusing on projects related to the Decentralized Web. We conducted a large-scale analysis of GitHub issues among diverse yet ideologically-related projects. We show that the percentage of discussions about values increases later in development, and we identify features and outcomes of conflicts related to open source participants' values. Finally, we propose suggestions to improve upon existing discussion practices by supporting common ground among collaborators with diverse goals, perspectives, and experiences.

Workers tend to make inferences about one another's commitment and dedication to work depending on what cues are available to them, affecting worker relationships and collaboration outcomes. In this work, we investigate how remote work affects workers' perceptions of their colleagues with different levels of social connectivity, commonly referred to as strong ties and weak ties. When working remotely, workers' perceptions of weak ties may suffer due to the lack of in-person interaction. On the other hand, workers' inferences about their strong ties may also be impacted by losing richer communication cues, even though they had more connections with their strong ties than weak ties. This study explores how remote workers make inferences about engagement levels of and willingness to collaborate with weak ties compared to strong ties. We used a mixed-methods approach involving survey data, experience sampling, and in-depth interviews with 20 workers from different companies in Taiwan. Results showed that workers depended on one-on-one synchronous tools to infer the engagement level of strong ties but used group-based communication tools to infer the engagement level of weak ties. Interestingly, the absence of cues in remote workplaces exacerbated prior impressions formed in the physical office. Furthermore, remote work led workers to develop polarized perceptions of their respective ties. We discuss how characteristics of computer-mediated communication tools and interaction types interplay to affect workers' perceptions of remote colleagues and identify design opportunities for helping remote workers maintain awareness of weak ties.

The growing online gig economy provides ways for women to participate in a flexible, remote workforce and close the offline gender pay and participation gap. While women in online labor marketplaces earn about as much overall as men, women set lower bill rates suggesting gender differences in pricing strategies. In this study, we surveyed 392 freelancers in the United States (US) on the popular marketplace platform, Upwork, to understand strategies used to set hourly bill rates. We did not find gender differences in pricing strategies that were significantly related to bill rate. Instead, we found that other factors, such as full-time freelancer status and level of self-esteem, may help explain gender differences in bill rates. To better support equity and fairness in the growing gig economy, CHI researchers must identify, assess, and address the complex interaction between societal conditions in online labor markets.

Freelancers increasingly earn their livelihood through online marketplaces. To attract new clients, freelancers continuously curate their online portfolios to convey their unique skills and style. However, many lack access to rapid, regular, and inexpensive feedback needed to improve their portfolios. Existing crowd feedback systems, which collect feedback on individual creative projects (i.e., decomposed approach), could fill this need, but it is unclear how they might support feedback on multiple projects (i.e., holistic approach). In a between-subjects study with 30 freelancers, we compared decomposed and holistic feedback collection approaches using CrowdFolio, a crowd feedback system for portfolios. The holistic approach helped freelancers discover new ways to describe their work, while the decomposed approach provided detailed insight about the visual attractiveness of projects. This study contributes evidence that portfolio feedback systems, regardless of collection approach, can positively support professional development by impacting how freelancers portray themselves online and reflect on their identity.

In many traditional labor markets, women earn less on average compared to men. However, it is unclear whether this discrepancy persists in the online gig economy, which bears important differences from the traditional labor market (e.g., more flexible work arrangements, shorter-term engagements, reputation systems). In this study, we collected self-determined hourly bill rates from the public profiles of 48,019 workers in the United States (48.8% women) on Upwork, a popular gig work platform. The median female worker set hourly bill rates that were 74% of the median man's hourly bill rates, a gap than cannot be entirely explained by online and offline work experience, education level, and job category. However, in some job categories, we found evidence of a more complex relationship between gender and earnings: women earned more overall than men by working more hours, outpacing the effect of lower hourly bill rates. To better support equality in the rapidly growing gig economy, we encourage continual evaluation of the complex gender dynamics on these platforms and discuss whose responsibility it is to address inequalities.

To meet the demand for authentic, timely, and affordable feedback, researchers have explored technologies to connect designers with feedback providers online. While researchers have implemented mechanisms to improve the content of feedback, most systems for online feedback exchange do not support an end-to-end cycle, from help-seeking to sense-making to action. Building on extant literature in learning sciences, design, organizational behavior, and online communities, we propose a conceptual framework to highlight critical processes that affect online feedback exchange. We contribute research questions for future feedback systems and argue that online feedback systems must be able to support designers through five activities that happen before, during, and after the feedback exchange. Our framework suggests that systems should address broader socio-psychological factors, such as how intent should be communicated online, how dialogue can support the interpretation of feedback, and how to balance the tradeoffs of anonymizing feedback providers.

Online feedback exchange (OFE) systems are an increasingly popular way to test concepts with millions of target users before going to market. Yet, we know little about how designers make sense of this abundant feedback. This empirical study investigates how expert and novice designers make sense of feedback in OFE systems. We observed that when feedback conflicted with frames originating from the participant's design knowledge, experts were more likely than novices to question the inconsistency, seeking critical information to expand their understanding of the design goals. Our results suggest that in order for OFE systems to be truly effective, they must be able to support nuances in sensemaking activities of novice and expert users.