Managing Episodic Volunteers in Free/Libre/Open Source Software Communities

Language
en
Document Type
Article
Issue Date
2020-04-08
Issue Year
2020
Authors
Barcomb, Ann
Stol, Klaas-Jan
Fitzgerald, Brian
Riehle, Dirk
Editor
Abstract

We draw on the concept of episodic volunteering (EV) from the general volunteering literature to identify practices for managing EV in free/libre/open source software (FLOSS) communities. Infrequent but ongoing participation is widespread, but the practices that community managers are using to manage EV, and their concerns about EV, have not been previously documented. We conducted a policy Delphi study involving 24 FLOSS community managers from 22 different communities. Our panel identified 16 concerns related to managing EV in FLOSS, which we ranked by prevalence. We also describe 65 practices for managing EV in FLOSS. Almost three-quarters of these practices are used by at least three community managers. We report these practices using a systematic presentation that includes context, relationships between practices, and concerns that they address. These findings provide a coherent framework that can help FLOSS community managers to better manage episodic contributors.

Journal Title
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
Citation
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9057411
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