How do FOSS projects actually use new README documents?
328 | Fri 02 Aug 11:45 a.m.–12:30 p.m.
Presented by
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Matt Gaughan
https://mgaughan.net/
Matt Gaughan is a graduate student researcher with the Community Data Science Collective. He is interested in helping to figure out how FLOSS communities' governance can best support their projects' software and is especially interested in how the collective management of software engineering impacts the critical utility of FLOSS projects in the global digital ecosystem. He is a PhD student in the Technology and Social Behavior program (a joint program in Computer Science and Communication Studies) at Northwestern University. Prior to this research, he worked as a software engineer.
Matt Gaughan
https://mgaughan.net/
Abstract
Without safeguards or redundancies, FOSS maintainers can find themselves unsupported in the upkeep of projects; this can concentrate risk, jeopardizing project health and software security. The suggestions for better community governance are often the same: grow documentation, recruit new maintainers, expand what it means to be a contributor. But does this common advice actually work? What impact do these prescriptions actually have in growing the project's maintainer community?
Studying over 2,000 FOSS projects packaged in the Debian distribution, we test how the popular recommendations of publishing README and CONTRIBUTING files actually impact project contribution activity and the recruitment of maintainers. Our work finds that, contrary to popular recommendations, governance files are often newly published in response to increased project activity and that the benefit of this new documentation is not always immediate. Further descriptive analysis of initial governance documents show a wide range of content and forms across projects as communities adopt standards and formats from different traditions.
In this talk, we will discuss our results and what they might mean for maintainers. We hope that maintainers will share their own experiences around community governance, project documentation, and FOSS evolution. Our empirical results are the starting point of a community conversation around the utility of governance files and how projects can better employ these documents for project health; we look forward to this talk opening a broader discussion about project organization and presentation.
Without safeguards or redundancies, FOSS maintainers can find themselves unsupported in the upkeep of projects; this can concentrate risk, jeopardizing project health and software security. The suggestions for better community governance are often the same: grow documentation, recruit new maintainers, expand what it means to be a contributor. But does this common advice actually work? What impact do these prescriptions actually have in growing the project's maintainer community? Studying over 2,000 FOSS projects packaged in the Debian distribution, we test how the popular recommendations of publishing README and CONTRIBUTING files actually impact project contribution activity and the recruitment of maintainers. Our work finds that, contrary to popular recommendations, governance files are often newly published in response to increased project activity and that the benefit of this new documentation is not always immediate. Further descriptive analysis of initial governance documents show a wide range of content and forms across projects as communities adopt standards and formats from different traditions. In this talk, we will discuss our results and what they might mean for maintainers. We hope that maintainers will share their own experiences around community governance, project documentation, and FOSS evolution. Our empirical results are the starting point of a community conversation around the utility of governance files and how projects can better employ these documents for project health; we look forward to this talk opening a broader discussion about project organization and presentation.