skip to main content


Title: The social embeddedness of peer production: A comparative qualitative analysis of three Indian language Wikipedia editions
Why do some peer production projects do a better job at engaging potential contributors than others? We address this question by comparing three Indian language Wikipedias, namely, Malayalam, Marathi, and Kannada. We found that although the three projects share goals, technological infrastructure, and a similar set of challenges, Malayalam Wikipedia’s community engages language speakers in contributing at a much higher rate than the others. Drawing from a grounded theory analysis of interviews with 18 community participants from the three projects, we found that experience with participatory governance and free/open-source software in the Malayalam community supported high engagement of contributors. Counterintuitively, we found that financial resources intended to increase participation in the Marathi and Kannada communities hindered the growth of these communities. Our findings underscore the importance of social and cultural context in the trajectories of peer production communities.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
2045055
NSF-PAR ID:
10330832
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ; ;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’22)
Page Range / eLocation ID:
1 to 18
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
More Like this
  1. Open Source Software (OSS) Foundations and projects are investing in creating Diversity and Inclusion (D&I) initiatives. However, little is known about contributors‘ perceptions about the usefulness and success of such initiatives. We aim to close this gap by investigating how contributors perceive the state of D&I in their community. In collaboration with the Apache Software Foundation (ASF), we surveyed 600+ OSS contributors and conducted 11 follow-up interviews. We used mixed methods to analyze our data-quantitative analysis of Likert-scale questions and qualitative analysis of open-ended survey question and the interviews to understand contributors‘ perceptions and critiques of the D&I initiative and how to improve it. Our results indicate that the ASF contributors felt that the state of D&I was still lacking, especially regarding gender, seniority, and English proficiency. Regarding the D&I initiative, some participants felt that the effort was unnecessary, while others agreed with the effort but critiqued its implementation. These findings show that D&I initiatives in OSS communities are a good start, but there is room for improvements. Our results can inspire the creation of new and the refinement of current initiatives. Open Source Software (OSS) is widely used in society (e.g., Linux, Chrome, and Firefox), and contributing to these projects helps individuals learn and showcase their skills, so much so that the history of contributions are increasingly being analyzed by hirers. However, the people who contribute to OSS are predominately men (about 90%). This means that women and other minorities lose out on job opportunities and OSS projects lose out on diversity of thought. OSS organizations such as the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) promote a variety of initiatives to increase diversity and inclusion (D&I) in their projects, but they are piecemeal and little is known about contributors‘ perceptions about the usefulness and success of these initiatives. Here, we surveyed and interviewed ASF contributors to understand their perceptions about the state of D&I in the ASF and the effectiveness of existing D&I initiatives. Our findings show that individuals who are in the minority face challenges (e.g., stereotyping, lack of peer-network, and representation in decision making) and contributors‘ perceptions of the D&I initiative are a mixed bag, ranging from commending the current efforts to considering them to be “lip service”. These findings suggest that current D&I initiatives in OSS communities are a good start, but much needs be done in terms of creating new successful initiatives and refining current ones. 
    more » « less
  2. Free and/or open-source software (or F/OSS) projects now play a major and dominant role in society, constituting critical digital infrastructure relied upon by companies, academics, non-profits, activists, and more. As F/OSS has become larger and more established, we investigate the labor of maintaining and sustaining those projects at various scales. We report findings from an interview-based study with contributors and maintainers working in a wide range of F/OSS projects. Maintainers of F/OSS projects do not just maintain software code in a more traditional software engineering understanding of the term: fixing bugs, patching security vulnerabilities, and updating dependencies. F/OSS maintainers also perform complex and often-invisible interpersonal and organizational work to keep their projects operating as active communities of users and contributors. We particularly focus on how this labor of maintaining and sustaining changes as projects and their software grow and scale across many dimensions. In understanding F/OSS to be as much about maintaining a communal project as it is maintaining software code, we discuss broadly applicable considerations for peer production communities and other socio-technical systems more broadly. 
    more » « less
  3. Women are underrepresented in Open Source Software (OSS) projects, as a result of which, not only do women lose career and skill development opportunities, but the projects themselves suffer from a lack of diversity of perspectives. Practitioners and researchers need to understand more about the phenomenon; however, studies about women in open source are spread across multiple fields, including information systems, software engineering, and social science. This paper systematically maps, aggregates, and synthesizes the state-of-the-art on women’s participation in OSS. It focuses on women contributors’ representation and demographics, how they contribute, their motivations and challenges, and strategies employed by communities to attract and retain women. We identified 51 articles (published between 2000 and 2021) that investigated women’s participation in OSS. We found evidence in these papers about who are the women who contribute, what motivates them to contribute, what types of contributions they make, challenges they face, and strategies proposed to support their participation. According to these studies, only about 5% of projects were reported to have women as core developers, and women authored less than 5% of pull-requests, but had similar or even higher rates of pull request acceptances than men. Women make both code and non-code contributions and their motivations to contribute include, learning new skills, altruism, reciprocity, and kinship. Challenges that women face in OSS are mainly social, including lack of peer parity and non-inclusive communication from a toxic culture. We found ten strategies reported in the literature, which we mapped to the reported challenges. Based on these results, we provide guidelines for future research and practice. 
    more » « less
  4. By definition, people are reticent or even unwilling to talk about taboo subjects. Because subjects like sexuality, health, and violence are taboo in most cultures, important information on each of these subjects can be difficult to obtain. Are peer produced knowledge bases like Wikipedia a promising approach for providing people with information on taboo subjects? With its reliance on volunteers who might also be averse to taboo, can the peer production model produce high-quality information on taboo subjects? In this paper, we seek to understand the role of taboo in knowledge bases produced by volunteers. We do so by developing a novel computational approach to identify taboo subjects and by using this method to identify a set of articles on taboo subjects in English Wikipedia. We find that articles on taboo subjects are more popular than non-taboo articles and that they are frequently vandalized. Despite frequent vandalism attacks, we also find that taboo articles are higher quality than non-taboo articles. We hypothesize that stigmatizing societal attitudes will lead contributors to taboo subjects to seek to be less identifiable. Although our results are consistent with this proposal in several ways, we surprisingly find that contributors make themselves more identifiable in others. 
    more » « less
  5. Open-source software has integrated itself into our daily lives, impacting 78% of US companies in 2015 [11]. Past studies of open-source community dynamics have found motivations behind contributions [3, 14, 18, 19] and the significance of community engagement [8, 17], but there are still many aspects not well understood. There's a direct correlation between the success of an open-source project and the social interactions within its community [7, 9, 17]. Most projects depend on a small group. A study by Avelino et al. [4] on the 133 most popular GitHub projects found that 86% will fail if one or two of its core contributors leave. To sustain open-source, we need to better understand how contributors interact, what information is shared, and what concerns practitioners have. We study common topics, how these have changed over time (2011 - 2021), and what social issues have appeared within open-source communities. Our research is guided by the following questions: (1) How is open-source changing/evolving? (2) What changes do practitioners believe are necessary for open-source to be sustainable? 
    more » « less