Code of conduct in open source projects

Abstract

Open source projects rely on collaboration of members from all around the world using web technologies like GitHub and Gerrit. This mixture of people with a wide range of backgrounds including minorities like women, ethnic minorities, and people with disabilities may increase the risk of offensive and destroying behaviours in the community, potentially leading affected project members to leave towards a more welcoming and friendly environment. To counter these effects, open source projects increasingly are turning to codes of conduct, in an attempt to promote their expectations and standards of ethical behaviour. In this first of its kind empirical study of codes of conduct in open source software projects, we investigated the role, scope and influence of codes of conduct through a mixture of quantitative and qualitative analysis, supported by interviews with practitioners. We found that the top codes of conduct are adopted by hundreds to thousands of projects, while all of them share 5 common dimensions.