Best Practices for Managing Open Source Communities

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Dirk Riehle
• Subject Area: Software Engineering and Programming Languages ; Data Management, Data-Intensive Systems, Computer Science Methods in Business Informatics
• Term: from 2018 to 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 393064881

• Final Report Year: 2023

Final Report Abstract

As part of theory building, we performed qualitative research and identified and explained 65 best practices which can be followed by community managers of open-source communities. These best practices can be utilized in community governance, community preparation, onboarding contributors, working with contributors, and contributor retention processes. We present the list of these practices with their context, concern, challenge, solution, and related practices. As part of the theory validation, we performed a quantitative survey. We evaluated the effects of contributor benefit motivations, social norms, psychological sense of community, satisfaction, community commitment factors on episodic volunteers’ intention to remain in the community. Furthermore, we investigated the use of 25 best practices we identified in a successful open-source community as community management practices. The research results are useful and of relevance for the management of volunteers in the open-source communities. From one hand it presents the best practices to use for community management. On the other hand it explains the factors which influence the volunteers’ intention to remain in the communities, which allows organizations to perform different actions to increase the retention.

Publications

• Why Do Episodic Volunteers Stay in FLOSS Communities?. 2019 IEEE/ACM 41st International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE), 948-959. IEEE.
  Barcomb, Ann; Stol, Klaas-Jan; Riehle, Dirk & Fitzgerald, Brian
  
• Uncovering the Periphery: A Qualitative Survey of Episodic Volunteering in Free/Libre and Open Source Software Communities. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 46(9), 962-980.
  Barcomb, Ann; Kaufmann, Andreas; Riehle, Dirk; Stol, Klaas-Jan & Fitzgerald, Brian
  
• Managing Episodic Volunteers in Free/Libre/Open Source Software Communities. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 48(1), 260-277.
  Barcomb, Ann; Stol, Klaas-Jan; Fitzgerald, Brian & Riehle, Dirk