Over the past few years, our team has been working on a few interrelated research projects about the work of maintaining Free & Open-Source Software (FOSS) projects. For more information about our project, read this blog post we wrote when we first received our research grant from the Ford & Sloan Foundations. Our team is an interdisciplinary mix tackling these issues from qualitative and quantitative perspectives, and many of us have also been maintainers of various FOSS projects:

Team

• R. Stuart Geiger, UC San Diego, Dept of Communication & Halıcıoğlu Data Science Institute
• Lilly Irani, UC San Diego, Dept of Communication & The Design Lab
• Dorothy Howard, UC San Diego, Dept of Communication & The Design Lab
• Alexandra Paxton, UCONN, Dept of Psychological Sciences
• Nelle Varoquaux, CNRS, Université Grenoble Alpes
• Chris Holdgraf, UC Berkeley, Berkeley Institute for Data Science

One-page summary of research and recommendations (PDF link)

Presentations

• Invisible Work, Incentives, & Burnout in Open Communities by Dorothy Howard at SciPy 2019
• The Invisible Work of Maintaining & Sustaining Open Source Software by R. Stuart Geiger at SciPy 2019
• “I didn’t sign up for this”: The Invisible Work of Maintaining Free/Open-Source Software Communities” recorded podcast of a discussion by R. Stuart Geiger and Dorothy Howard at the 2020 Annual Meeting of the Society for the Social Studies of Science (4S), part of a 9 episode series on “Hacker Cultures: Understanding the Actors Behind Our Software”
• Panel discussion: “Labor, Roles, and Incentives in Digital Infrastructure” with R. Stuart Geiger, a panel hosted by the Ford and Sloan Digitial Infrastructure Initiative

Publications

• R. Stuart Geiger, Dorothy Howard, and Lilly Irani. 2021. The Labor of Maintaining and Scaling Free and Open-Source Software Projects. Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact. 5, CSCW1, Article 175 (April 2021), 28 pages. https://stuartgeiger.com/papers/maintaining-scaling-foss-cscw2021.pdf

• Geiger, R.S., Varoquaux, N., Mazel-Cabasse, C., and Holdgraf, C. “The Types, Roles, and Practices of Documentation in Data Analytics Open Source Software Libraries.” Computer Supported Cooperative Work (JCSCW) 27, 767–802 (2018). https://osf.io/2fdhr/download https://doi.org/10.1007/s10606-018-9333-1

• Paxton, A., Varoquaux, N., Holdgraf, C. and Geiger, R.S. (2022), Community, Time, and (Con)text: A Dynamical Systems Analysis of Online Communication and Community Health among Open-Source Software Communities. Cognitive Science, 46: e13134. https://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.13134