Community Data Science Collective

In the seventh talk of the Science of Community track we organized for FOSSY, Google FOSS researcher Sophia Vargas offered an overview of different strategies for measuring the value of open source (particularly in the context of a company thinking about how to engage with FOSS).

Some of Sophia’s key insights are: models for measuring one-time cost are relatively widespread (but depend on outcome metrics like lines of code rather than difficulty); understanding the cost of maintenance and community is still in formative stages; and that business leaders can make use of research-grounded models developed to measure value and risk in an academic context into decisionmaking tools within a business context.

This is part 7 of an 8-part series sharing highlights from the Science of Community track at FOSSY. Visit the FOSSY site for more bio details and an abstract of the talk.

Missed the prospective student Q&A session? Fear not, you can still hear from our faculty members, see a few examples of current students research, and listen to answers for our prospective student audience.

You can find more resources about the Community Data Science Collective below:

• Faculty answers to submitted questions
• CDSC presentation slides
• The “Not So Obvious” Graduate School FAQ

Still have questions for our group? Check out our people page to learn more about the faculty, students, and other members of the collective.

In the sixth talk of the Science of Community track we organized for FOSSY, independent FOSS researcher Darius Kazemi described the results of an interview study to learn from the moderation teams of decentralized social network servers. One of Darius’ key observations is the extensive compliance and legally-required work that running such a server requires.

This is part 6 of an 8-part series sharing highlights from the Science of Community track at FOSSY. Visit the FOSSY site for more bio details and an abstract of the talk.

In the final talk of the Science of Community track we organized for FOSSY, Computer Science professor and FOSS researcher Dr. Bogdan Vasilescu described his team’s work to understand how developers think about abandoned dependencies. One of the key insights from this work is that abandonment of dependencies is quite common, but that updating a package to remove the abandoned dependencies is very slow — and that one of the factors that drives faster replacement is when projects explicitly announce that they are ending maintenance.

This is part 8 of an 8-part series sharing highlights from the Science of Community track at FOSSY. Visit the FOSSY site for more bio details and an abstract of the talk.

This is part 5 of an 8-part series sharing highlights from the Science of Community track at FOSSY. Visit the FOSSY site for more bio details and an abstract of the talk.

In the fourth talk of the Science of Community track we organized for FOSSY, principal developer advocate Paige Cruz shared the results of her investigation into the subject of how we can all do a better job of asking questions of one another in FOSS communities. One of her key insights is to invite us to engage with the perspective of those who might answer our question, and to think critically about what details we include and whether they really help others understand and respond — for example, a screenshot of our code can’t be copy pasted and might be unreadable, but a screenshot of a UI bug might replace wordy description.

This is part 4 of an 8-part series sharing highlights from the Science of Community track at FOSSY. Visit the FOSSY site for more bio details and an abstract of the talk.

In the third talk of the Science of Community track we organized for FOSSY, FOSS leader Ben Ford described his experience navigating the changes in his role when the Puppet project’s commercial partner was acquired by a private equity company. One of the essential takeaways from this talk is the different perspective towards community that a FOSS company takes versus a private equity company, and the challenge of communicating value in this context.

This is part 3 of an 8-part series sharing highlights from the Science of Community track at FOSSY. Visit the FOSSY site for more bio details and an abstract of the talk.

In the second talk of the Science of Community track we organized for FOSSY, CDSC PhD student Matthew Gaughan shared his research to understand how communities actually use README and CONTRIBUTING documents. Although guides to FOSS communities often recommend these documents be extensive and used as part of welcoming new contributors, we find that READMEs are often quite preliminary, and that CONTRIBUTING guides are often a reaction to an influx of contributions.

This is part 2 of an 8-part series sharing highlights from the Science of Community track at FOSSY. Visit the FOSSY site for more bio details and an abstract of the talk.

Back in July, we kicked off the FOSSY conference Science of Community track with a talk from Dr. Dawn Foster. Dr. Foster shared an update on the work of the CHAOSS project to empower communities to use metrics to understand and improve their practices. Their Practitioner Guide Series, coupled with FOSS analytical tools, will help any community get started on their metrics journey.

This is part 1 of an 8-part series sharing highlights from the Science of Community track at FOSSY. Visit the FOSSY site for more bio details and an abstract of the talk.

On September 27th, we held our 9th Science of Community Dialogue with Sohyeon Hwang (Northwestern) and Seth Frey (University of California-Davis) sharing their research and insights on how communities self-govern amidst competing pressures in complex, multi-layered environments.

Sohyeon presented her work on “Trust and Friction: Community Governance and Privacy on Decentralized Social Media”. Her research aimed to answer the questions of “what aspects of community governance do communities use to shape privacy expectations?” and “how does the decentralized nature of that platform aid or undermine those expectations?”

Seth discussed his research on Apache, looking to answer the question “do things run the way they say they run?” His research explored the relationships between rules and regulations, how often these same rules as discussed among the community, and what exactly is being governed.

All in all, it was a wonderful dialogue and we greatly appreciate Sohyeon and Seth taking the time to share their research, as well as all our attendees joining us for a great discussion.