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1. Perceptions of the state of D&I and D&I initiative in the ASF

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3510458.3513008  

   Guizani, Mariam; Trinkenreich, Bianca; Castro-Guzman, Aileen Abril; Steinmacher, Igor; Gerosa, Marco; Sarma, Anita (May 2022, ACM/IEEE 44rd International Conference on Software Engineering, SEIS - Software Engineering in Society (ICSE SEIS 2022))

   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. 

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2. The Long Road Ahead: Ongoing Challenges in Contributing to Large OSS Organizations and What to Do

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3479551  

   Guizani, Mariam; Chatterjee, Amreeta; Trinkenreich, Bianca; May, Mary Evelyn; Noa-Guevara, Geraldine J.; Russell, Liam James; Cuevas Zambrano, Griselda G.; Izquierdo-Cortazar, Daniel; Steinmacher, Igor; Gerosa, Marco A.; et al (October 2021, Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction)

   Open source communities hosted in large foundations operate in a complex socio-technical ecosystem, which includes a heterogeneous mix of projects and stakeholders. Previous work has thus far investigated the challenges faced in OSS communities from the point of view of specific stakeholders, primarily at the level of individual projects. None have yet studied the challenges faced within a large, federated open source organization. In this paper, we aim to bridge this gap to identify ongoing challenges contributors face in a mature OSS organization. To do so, we surveyed 624 contributors at the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) and ran 11 semi-structured follow up interviews. We validated our findings through member checking with the interviewees as well as the ASF Diversity and Inclusion (D&I) committee. The contributions of this paper include: (1) an empirically-evidenced conceptual model of the 88 challenges that contributors face in a mature OSS foundation and (2) a set of 48 community-recommended strategies for alleviating these challenges. Our results show that even well-established and mature organizations still face a variety of individual and project-specific challenges and that it is difficult to design a comprehensive set of processes and guidelines to match the needs and expectations of a diverse and large federated community. Our conceptual challenges model and associated strategies to mitigate them can provide guidance to other OSS foundations and projects helping them in building better support processes and tools to create a successful, thriving community of contributors. 

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3. Exploring Apache Incubator Project Trajectories with APEX

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3524842.3528506  

   Anirudh Ramchandran; Likang Yin; Vladimir Filkov (May 2022, 2022 IEEE/ACM 19th International Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR))

   Open Source Software (OSS) is a major component of our digital infrastructure, yet more than 80% of such projects fail. Seeking less uncertainty, many OSS projects join established software communi- ties, e.g., the Apache Software Foundation (ASF), with established rules and community support to guide projects toward sustainabil- ity. In their nascent stage, ASF projects are incubated in the ASF incubator (ASFI), which provides systematic mentorship toward long-term sustainability. Projects in ASFI eventually conclude their incubation by either graduating, if successful, or retiring, if not. Time-stamped traces of developer activities are publicly avail- able from ASF, and can be used for monitoring project trajectories toward sustainability. Here we present a web app dashboard tool, APEX, that allows internal and external stakeholders to monitor and explore ASFI project sustainability trajectories, including social and technical networks. 

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4. Cui Bono: Do Open Source Software Incubator Policies and Procedures Benefit the Projects or the Incubator?

   https://doi.org/10.5334/ijc.1176  

   Sen, A.; Atkisson, C.; Schweik, C (April 2022, The international journal of the commons)

   Open source software (OSS), a form of Digital or Knowledge Commons, underlies much of the technology that we use in our daily lives. The existence and continuation of OSS relies on the contribution of private resources – personal time, volunteer energy, and effort of numerous actors (e.g., software developers’ time as a common-pool resource) – to public goods, the benefits of which are enjoyed by everyone. Nonprofit organizations such as the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) attempt to aid this process by providing various collective services to OSS projects, acting as a second-order actor in the production of the public good. To this end, the ASF Incubator has created policies – essentially rules or norms – that serve to protect its interests and, as they say, increase the sustainability of the projects. Each policy requires investment by ASF (in terms of money or the use of volunteer time) or an incubating project (in terms of taking project personnel time), the benefits of which can accrue to either party. Such policies may impose additional costs on incubating projects, leading to a decreased production of the OSS public good. Using the ASF Incubator policy documents, we construct a dataset that records who – ASF or an incubating project – bears the cost and who enjoys the benefit of each policy and procedure. We can code most policy statements as costing one party and benefiting one party. The distribution of costs and benefits according to party indicates whether the second-order actor is contributing to an increase in the public good and if they are doing so sustainably. Through a two-way ANOVA, we characterize the impact of ASF policies on the production of public goods (OSS). Being a part of ASF imposes some costs on projects, but these costs may make projects more sustainable. Our analysis shows that the distribution of costs and benefits is fairly symmetric between the ASF and incubating projects. Thus, the configuration of policies or the “institutional design” of the ASF could aid in producing the OSS public good by providing services that projects require. 

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5. Open Source Software Sustainability: Combining Institutional Analysis and Socio-Technical Networks

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3555129  

   Yin, Likang; Chakraborti, Mahasweta; Yan, Yibo; Schweik, Charles; Frey, Seth; Filkov, Vladimir (November 2022, 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. 

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