Open-source software projects have become an integral part of our daily life, supporting virtually every software we use today. Since open-source software forms the digital infrastructure, maintaining them is of utmost importance. We present Climate Coach, a dashboard that helps open-source project maintainers monitor the health of their community in terms of team climate and inclusion. Through a literature review and an exploratory survey (N=18), we identified important signals that can reflect a project’s health, and display them on a dashboard. We evaluated and refined our dashboard through two rounds of think-aloud studies (N=19). We then conducted a two-week longitudinal diary study (N=10) to test the usefulness of our dashboard. We found that displaying signals that are related to a project’s inclusion help improve maintainers’ management strategies.

Open source software represents an important form of digital infrastructure as well as a pathway to technical careers for many developers, but women are drastically underrepresented in this setting. Although there is a good body of literature on open source participation, there is very little understanding of the participation trajectories and contribution experiences of women developers, and how they compare to those of men developers, in open source software projects. In order to understand their joining and participation trajectories, we conducted interviews with 23 developers (11 men and 12 women) who became core in an open source project. We identify differences in women and men's motivations for initial contributions and joining processes (e.g. women participating in projects that they have been invited to) and sustained involvement in a project. We also describe unique negative experiences faced by women contributors in this setting in each stage of participation. Our results have implications for diversifying participation in open source software and understanding open source as a pathway to technical careers.

Prior studies have shown that, in open-source software (OSS), diversity is a positive indicator of productivity. Yet, code submissions from underrepresented groups are less successful. This mirrors the diversity-innovation paradox found in science-diverse groups produce more innovations, but historically underrepresented people have less successful careers in these groups. In this preliminary research, we want to investigate whether the effect of the diversity-innovation paradox is present in OSS. We define software innovation as a novel co-usage of two packages in the same project. Using World of Code, we identified JavaScript projects' innovations from late 2008 to early 2014. We intend to calculate diversity measures for the authors who produced the innovations and build models to test the presence of the diversity-innovation paradox in OSS.

Sustained participation by contributors in opensource software is critical to the survival of open-source projects and can provide career advancement benefits to individual contributors. However, not all contributors reap the benefits of open-source participation fully, with prior work showing that women are particularly underrepresented and at higher risk of disengagement. While many barriers to participation in open-source have been documented in the literature, relatively little is known about how the social networks that open-source contributors form impact their chances of long-term engagement. In this paper we report on a mixed-methods empirical study of the role of social capital (i.e., the resources people can gain from their social connections) for sustained participation by women and men in open-source GitHub projects. After combining survival analysis on a large, longitudinal data set with insights derived from a user survey, we confirm that while social capital is beneficial for prolonged engagement for both genders, women are at disadvantage in teams lacking diversity in expertise.

While open-source software has become ubiquitous, its sustainability is in question: without a constant supply of contributor effort, open-source projects are at risk. While prior work has extensively studied the motivations of open-source contributors in general, relatively little is known about how people choose which project to contribute to, beyond personal interest. This question is especially relevant in transparent social coding environments like GitHub, where visible cues on personal profile and repository pages, known as signals, are known to impact impression formation and decision making. In this paper, we report on a mixed-methods empirical study of the signals that influence the contributors' decision to join a GitHub project. We first interviewed 15 GitHub contributors about their project evaluation processes and identified the important signals they used, including the structure of the README and the amount of recent activity. Then, we proceeded quantitatively to test out the impact of each signal based on the data of 9,977 GitHub projects. We reveal that many important pieces of information lack easily observable signals, and that some signals may be both attractive and unattractive. Our findings have direct implications for open-source maintainers and the design of social coding environments, e.g., features to be added to facilitate better project searching experience.