skip to main content

Explore Research Products in the NSF-PAR

Title: Ecosystem-level determinants of sustained activity in open-source projects: a case study of the PyPI ecosystem
Open-source projects do not exist in a vacuum. They benefit from reusing other projects and themselves are being reused by others, creating complex networks of interdependencies, i.e., software ecosystems. Therefore, the sustainability of projects comprising ecosystems may no longer by determined solely by factors internal to the project, but rather by the ecosystem context as well. In this paper we report on a mixed-methods study of ecosystem-level factors affecting the sustainability of open-source Python projects. Quantitatively, using historical data from 46,547 projects in the PyPI ecosystem, we modeled the chances of project development entering a period of dormancy (limited activity) as a function of the projects' position in their dependency networks, organizational support, and other factors. Qualitatively, we triangulated the revealed effects and further expanded on our models through interviews with project maintainers. Results show that the number of project ties and the relative position in the dependency network have significant impact on sustained project activity, with nuanced effects early in a project's life cycle and later on.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1633437 1633083
NSF-PAR ID:
10106647
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
Proceedings of the 2018 26th ACM Joint Meeting on European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering
Page Range / eLocation ID:
644 to 655
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
More Like this
  1. ; ; ; ; ; ( , Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction)

    Sustainable Open Source Software (OSS) forms much of the fabric of our digital society, especially successful and sustainable ones. But many OSS projects do not become sustainable, resulting in abandonment and even risks for the world's digital infrastructure. Prior work has looked at the reasons for this mainly from two very different perspectives. In software engineering, the focus has been on understanding success and sustainability from the socio-technical perspective: the OSS programmers' day-to-day activities and the artifacts they create. In institutional analysis, on the other hand, emphasis has been on institutional designs (e.g., policies, rules, and norms) that structure project governance. Even though each is necessary for a comprehensive understanding of OSS projects, the connection and interaction between the two approaches have been barely explored.

    In this paper, we make the first effort toward understanding OSS project sustainability using a dual-view analysis, by combining institutional analysis with socio-technical systems analysis. In particular, we (i) use linguistic approaches to extract institutional rules and norms from OSS contributors' communications to represent the evolution of their governance systems, and (ii) construct socio-technical networks based on longitudinal collaboration records to represent each project's organizational structure. We combined the two methods and applied them to a dataset of developer digital traces from 253 nascent OSS projects within the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) incubator. We find that the socio-technical and institutional features relate to each other, and provide complimentary views into the progress of the ASF's OSS projects. Refining these combined analyses can help provide a more precise understanding of the synchronization between the evolution of institutional governance and organizational structure.

     
    more » « less
  2. ; ; ( , Proceedings of the ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering)
    While lots of research has explored howto prevent maintainers from abandoning the open-source projects that serve as our digital infrastructure, there are very few insights on addressing abandonment when it occurs. We argue open-source sustainability research must expand its focus beyond trying to keep particular projects alive, to also cover the sustainable use of open source by supporting users when they face potential or actual abandonment.We interviewed 33 developers who have experienced open-source dependency abandonment. Often, they used multiple strategies to cope with abandonment, for example, first reaching out to the community to find potential alternatives, then switching to a community-accepted alternative if one exists. We found many developers felt they had little to no support or guidance when facing abandonment, leaving them to figure out what to do through a trial-and-error process on their own. Abandonment introduces cost for otherwise seemingly free dependencies, but users can decide whether and how to prepare for abandonment through a number of different strategies, such as dependency monitoring, building abstraction layers, and community involvement. In many cases, community members can invest in resources that help others facing the same abandoned dependency, but often do not because of the many other competing demands on their time – a form of the volunteer’s dilemma. We discuss cost reduction strategies and ideas to overcome this volunteer’s dilemma. Our findings can be used directly by open-source users seeking resources on dealing with dependency abandonment, or by researchers to motivate future work supporting the sustainable use of open source. 
    more » « less
  3. ; ; ; ( , Restoration Ecology)

    Ensuring the long‐term persistence of tropical forest restoration projects is vital to maintaining carbon stocks, biodiversity, and other benefits of restored ecosystems. But our understanding of the factors that determine restoration longevity—the age that a restored ecosystem attains before being converted to another land use—is limited, and derived primarily from studies based on remote sensing or observations at a single site over time. In this article, we apply a new approach by surveying restoration practitioners from across the tropics on the factors that they perceive to influence restoration longevity. Through an online survey (including categorical and open‐ended questions) we asked practitioners about the ecological and social characteristics of their restoration projects, and their views on what factors contribute to project longevity. We summarized the information on project characteristics, and conducted thematic analysis and coding of the longevity drivers discussed by respondents. A total of 29 respondents from 15 tropical countries completed our survey, with the majority of projects occurring on previously pastured lands in wet and lowland tropical forests. Practitioners discussed social factors more than twice as frequently as ecological factors. The most frequently cited social factor key to restoration longevity was engagement with multiple stakeholders, followed by long‐term funding, the need for innovative project design, as well as effective and inspirational leadership. Overall, the voices of practitioners underscore the critical need to address local social context in order to achieve long‐term forest recovery.

     
    more » « less
  4. ( , PloS one)
    Mentoring has been a subject of study for 50 years. Most studies of mentoring programs evaluate the effect of the program on the participants but do not evaluate if different mentors have different effects on mentees. Open-source software (OSS) is software with a license that allows it to be freely used by other people. Such software has become foundational to the world economy. However, many OSS projects get abandoned by their creators. Various nonprofit organizations have arisen to help OSS projects become sustainable. One of the key services offered by many of these nonprofit organizations is a mentorship program where experienced OSS developers advise nascent projects on how to achieve sustainability. We use data from the Apache Software Foundation Incubator program where 303 mentors have mentored 286 projects, with most mentoring more than one project, to address this question: Is who a project has as a mentor associated with variation in project success? Who a project has as a mentor accounts for 45% of the variation in project outcomes, with some mentors being associated with positive and some with negative outcomes. These mentors could offer insights into how to improve the mentoring program. This result also demonstrates, more broadly, that the nature of specific mentoring relationships may be important to understanding how mentors impact outcomes in other mentoring programs. 
    more » « less
  5. ; ( , Environmental Research Letters)
    Abstract The use of recreational ecosystem services is highly dependent on the surrounding environmental and climate conditions. Due to this dependency, future recreational opportunities provided by nature are at risk from climate change. To understand how climate change will impact recreation we need to understand current recreational patterns, but traditional data is limited and low resolution. Fortunately, social media data presents an opportunity to overcome those data limitations and machine learning offers a tool to effectively use that big data. We use data from the social media site Flickr as a proxy for recreational visitation and random forest to model the relationships between social, environmental, and climate factors and recreation for the peak season (summer) in California. We then use the model to project how non-urban recreation will change as the climate changes. Our model shows that current patterns are exacerbated in the future under climate change, with currently popular summer recreation areas becoming more suitable and unpopular summer recreation areas becoming less suitable for recreation. Our model results have land management implications as recreation regions that see high visitation consequently experience impacts to surrounding ecosystems, ecosystem services, and infrastructure. This information can be used to include climate change impacts into land management plans to more effectively provide sustainable nature recreation opportunities for current and future generations. Furthermore, our study demonstrates that crowdsourced data and machine learning offer opportunities to better integrate socio-ecological systems into climate impacts research and more holistically understand climate change impacts to human well-being. 
    more » « less
  • Citation Formats
  • MLA
  • APA
  • Chicago
  • BibTeX
  • Save / Share this Record
  • Send to Email