Community Tapestry: An actionable tool to track turnover and diversity in OSS

IF 4.3 2区计算机科学 Q2 COMPUTER SCIENCE, INFORMATION SYSTEMS

Information and Software Technology Pub Date : 2025-08-19 DOI:10.1016/j.infsof.2025.107871

Mariam Guizani , Zixuan Feng , Emily Judith Arteaga Garcia , Katie Kimura , Diane Mueller , Luis Cañas Díaz , Alexander Serebrenik , Anita Sarma

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引用次数: 0

Abstract

Context:

A healthy open-source software (OSS) community is one that has a diverse contributor base and is sustainable by retaining its contributors. Project leaders, therefore, must understand their community’s turnover and diversity makeup.

Objectives:

This study aims to investigate how to support project leaders in monitoring OSS community health. Specifically, we examine the role of an interactive dashboard in enhancing awareness of contributor turnover and diversity.

Methods:

We designed and developed Community Tapestry, a dynamic, daily-updated dashboard, using Participatory Design (PD) sessions with stakeholders from the Apache Software Foundation (ASF), Community Health Analytics in Open Source Software (CHAOSS), and Bitergia Analytics. We initially evaluated Community Tapestry by engaging contributors from our PD partners’ OSS projects. To further validate our findings, we conducted a confirmatory study with a prominent OSS project under the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). Contributors from both projects explored a personalized version of the dashboard that uses their own up-to-date project data.

Results:

Our results demonstrate that Community Tapestry enhanced participants’ awareness of their community’s turnover and diversity state. It enabled them to identify areas for improvement and provided actionable insights to foster a more inclusive and stable community.

Conclusion:

Community Tapestry offers OSS project leaders an actionable approach to monitor turnover and diversity state, enabling data-driven governance and fostering more inclusive and sustainable communities. Our PD approach provides practical insights into how community-driven interventions can be developed and adopted.

查看原文本刊更多论文

社区挂毯：一个可操作的工具，用于跟踪OSS的周转和多样性

上下文：一个健康的开源软件（OSS）社区是一个拥有多样化贡献者基础并通过保留其贡献者而可持续发展的社区。因此，项目负责人必须了解他们社区的人员流动和多样性构成。目的：本研究旨在探讨如何支持项目负责人监测OSS社区健康。具体而言，我们研究了交互式仪表板在提高贡献者更替和多样性意识方面的作用。方法：我们设计并开发了Community Tapestry，这是一个动态的、每日更新的仪表板，使用了与来自Apache软件基金会（ASF）、开源软件社区健康分析（CHAOSS）和Bitergia Analytics的利益相关者的参与式设计（PD）会议。我们最初通过与PD合作伙伴的OSS项目的贡献者合作来评估Community Tapestry。为了进一步验证我们的发现，我们对云原生计算基金会（CNCF）下的一个著名OSS项目进行了验证性研究。来自两个项目的贡献者探索了仪表板的个性化版本，该版本使用了他们自己的最新项目数据。结果：社区挂毯增强了参与者对社区流动和多样性状态的认知。它使他们能够确定需要改进的领域，并提供可行的见解，以建立一个更加包容和稳定的社区。结论：Community Tapestry为OSS项目领导者提供了一种可操作的方法来监控周转和多样性状态，支持数据驱动的治理，并培养更具包容性和可持续性的社区。我们的PD方法为如何开发和采用社区驱动的干预措施提供了实用的见解。

本文章由计算机程序翻译，如有差异，请以英文原文为准。

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来源期刊

Information and Software Technology 工程技术-计算机：软件工程

CiteScore

9.10

自引率

7.70%

发文量

164

审稿时长

9.6 weeks

期刊介绍： Information and Software Technology is the international archival journal focusing on research and experience that contributes to the improvement of software development practices. The journal''s scope includes methods and techniques to better engineer software and manage its development. Articles submitted for review should have a clear component of software engineering or address ways to improve the engineering and management of software development. Areas covered by the journal include: • Software management, quality and metrics, • Software processes, • Software architecture, modelling, specification, design and programming • Functional and non-functional software requirements • Software testing and verification & validation • Empirical studies of all aspects of engineering and managing software development Short Communications is a new section dedicated to short papers addressing new ideas, controversial opinions, "Negative" results and much more. Read the Guide for authors for more information. The journal encourages and welcomes submissions of systematic literature studies (reviews and maps) within the scope of the journal. Information and Software Technology is the premiere outlet for systematic literature studies in software engineering.