Training the future workforce through task curation in an OSS ecosystem

Volunteers to Open Source Software (OSS) projects contribute not only to help creating software that they use, but also to gain skills and enrich their expertise and resumes. However, newcomers to OSS face several challenges when joining a project. Particularly, they do not know where to start, or choose tasks that they can be successful at. Here, we describe our vision towards BugExchange, a system that curates tasks from OSS projects and helps train newcomers. While evaluating and executing these tasks, newcomers can gain an understanding about the project, its technology, and concepts. There are many challenges in designing such a system. For example, identifying the information needs of newcomers, creating task recommendations that match newcomers’ skills and career goals, and providing mentoring and networking support. We plan to leverage our previous work to conceive and prototype our system, which will include multiple research lines. BugExchange has the potential to improve newcomer learning experiences, reduce dropouts, and foster community building.