Welcome to part 1 of a 7-part series spotlighting the excellent talks we were fortunate enough to host during the Science of Community track at FOSSY 23!
Sophia Vargas presented ‘Can we combat maintainer burnout with proactive metrics?’ In this talk, Sophia takes us through her extensive investigations across multiple projects to weigh the value of different metrics to anticipate when people might be burning out, including some surprising instances where metrics we might think are helpful really don’t tell us what we think they do.
You can watch the talk HERE and learn more about Sophia’s work HERE.
The CDSC hosted the Science of Community Track on July 15th at FOSSY this year — it was an awesome day of learning and conversation with a fantastic group of senior scholars, industry partners, students, practitioners, community members, and more! We are so grateful and eager to build on the discussions we began.
If you missed the sessions, watch this space! Most sessions were recorded, and we’ll post links and materials as they’re released.
Special thanks to Molly de Blanc for all the long distance organizing work; Shauna Gordon McKeon for stepping in to help share some closing thoughts on the Science of Community track at the very last minute, and to the FOSSY organizing team for convening such a warm, welcoming inaugural event (indeed, the warmth was palpable as it nearly hit 100° F on Friday and Saturday in Portland).
One tangible result of a free software conference: new laptop stickers!
Kaylea Champion, and Benjamin Mako Hill and Aaron Shaw with Sejal Khatri (who won’t be at FOSSY)
The Science of Community track is inspired by the CDSC Science of Community Dialogues, which aim to bring together practitioners and researchers to discuss scholarly work that is relevant to the efforts of practitioners. As researchers, we get so much from the communities we work with and study and we want them to also learn from the research they so generously take part in. While the Dialogues cover a broad range of topics and communities, FOSSY presentations focus on how that work related to free and open source software communities, projects, and practitioners.
At FOSSY, we will have a number of really amazing researchers presenting their work. We wanted to share some highlights from the schedule.
Sophia Vargas, from Google’s Open Source Programs Office, will be presenting on how metrics can help us understand contributor burnout. Professor Shoji Kajita, from Kyoto University, will discuss research data management for FOSS communities. Mariam Guizani, from Oregon State University, will cover research on the why and how of corporate participation in FOSS. We will additionally have lightning talks by Adam Hyde, Anita Sarma, Shauna Gordon-McKeon, and incoming Northwestern Ph.D. student Matthew Gaughan.
We are really excited about our workshop “Let’s Get Real: Putting Research Findings Into Practice.” This workshop, designed for FOSS contributors and practitioners, will help guide you on how to get the most out of the incredible research on and relevant to FOSS. If you want to learn how to navigate the sheer volume of interesting research work happening or how to understand what it means, this is the session for you! Our workshop will be led by Kaylea Chamption and Professors Aaron Shaw and Benjamin Mako Hill. You can read more on our wiki.
Join the Community Data Science Collective (CDSC) for our 5th Science of Community Dialogue! This Community Dialogue will take place on May 19 at 10:00 am PDT (18:00 UTC). This Dialogue focuses on digital inequalities and online community participation. Professor Hernan Galperin (University of Southern California) will join Floor Fiers (Northwestern University) to present recent research on topics including:
Inequalities in online access and participation
Differentiated participation in online communities
Causes and consequences of online inequalities
Digital skills as a barrier to online participation
The Community Data Science Collective (CDSC) is an interdisciplinary research group made of up of faculty and students at the University of Washington Department of Communication, the Northwestern University Department of Communication Studies, the Carleton College Computer Science Department, and the Purdue University School of Communication.
Learn more
If you’d like to learn more or get future updates about the Science of Community Dialogues, please join the low volume announcement list.
Help us build a dynamic and exciting program to facilitate conversations between free and open source software (FOSS) researchers and practitioners! Submit a session proposal for FOSSY! The deadline for submissions is May 14 May 18 (Edit: The deadline has been moved.).
A Spring 2015 CDSC workshop. Photo by Sage Ross, licensed Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike
Although scholars publish hundreds of papers about free and open source software, online governance, licensing, and other topics very relevant to FOSS communities each year, much of this work never makes it out of academic journals and conferences and back to FOSS communities. At the same time, FOSS communities have a range of insights, questions, and data that researchers studying FOSS could benefit from enormously.
The goal of this track is to build bridges between FOSS communities and scientific research conducted with and about FOSS communities. We hope to provide opportunities for community members to hear about exciting results from researchers; opportunities for researchers to learn from the FOSS community members; and spaces for the FOSS community to think together about how to improve FOSS projects by leveraging research insights and research.
This track will include opportunities for:
researchers to talk with practitioners (about their research)
practitioners to talk with researchers (about their needs)
researchers to talk with other researchers (for learning and collaboration)
FOSSY runs July 13 – 16, and we are hoping to have 2-3 days of content. Towards that end, we are seeking proposals! If you are a researcher with work of relevance to FOSS community members; a FOSS community member with experiences or opportunities relevant to research; or just want to be involved in this conversation, please consider proposing in one of the following formats:
Short Talks. Do you have a recent project to share in some depth? A topic that needs time to unpack? Take 20 minutes to present your thoughts. Following each presentation there will be time for group discussion to help participants apply your work to their practice.
Lightning Talks. Want to make a focused point, pitch, or problem report to a great audience? Bring your 5-minute talk to our lightning round.
Panels. We will be facilitating dialogue between researchers and community members. Would you be willing to share your thoughts as a panelist? Let us know your expertise and a few notes on your perspective so that we can develop a diverse and engaging panel. Contact us directly (details below) if you are interested in being on a panel.
If you have an idea that doesn’t fit into these formats, let’s chat! You can reach out to Kaylea (kaylea@uw.edu), Molly (molly.deblanc@northwestern.edu) or submit your idea as a proposal via the FOSSY form.
Submissions are non-archival, so we welcome ongoing, completed, and already published research work. Non-archival means that presentation of work at FOSSY does not constitute a publication. It’s just a way to get your work out there! Work that synthesizes or draws across a body of published papers is particularly welcome.
What kind of research are you looking to have presented?
We are interested in any topic related to FOSS communities! This might include research from computing (including software engineering, computer security, social computing, HCI), the social sciences and humanities (including management, philosophy, law, economics, sociology, communication, and more), information sciences, and beyond.
For example: how to identify undermaintained FOSS packages and what to do about it; community growth and how to find success in small communities; effective rule making and enforcement in online communities.
If it involves FOSS or is of interest to FOSS practitioners, we welcome it! We are eager to help you put your results into the hands of practitioners who can use your findings to inform their own community’s practices and policies on social, governance, and technical topics.
We hope to welcome scholars and researchers from across academia, government, industry, or wherever else you are from!
Who will I be speaking with?
We expect a multi-disciplinary audience. FOSSY will be bringing together free and open source software practitioners including community managers, designers, legal experts, non-profit and project leaders, technical developers, technical writers, and researchers.
The track is being organized by:
Kaylea Champion, Community Data Science Collective and the University of Washington
Molly de Blanc, Community Data Science Collective and Northwestern University
Benjamin Mako Hill, Community Data Science Collective and the University of Washington
Aaron Shaw, Community Data Science Collective and Northwestern University
Our fourth Community Dialogue covered topics on accountable governance and data leverage as a tool for accountable governance. It featured Amy X. Zhang (University of Washington) and recent CDSC graduate Nick Vincent (Northwestern, UC Davis).
Designing and Building Governance in Online Communities (Amy X. Zhang)
This session discussed different methods of engagement between communities and their governance structures, different models of governance, and empirical work to understand tensions within communities and governance structures. Amy presented PolicyKit, a tool her team built in response to what they learned from their research, which will also help to continue to better understand governance.
Can We Solve Emerging Problems in Technology and AI By Giving Communities Data Leverage? (Nick Vincent)
Nick Vincent looked at the question of how to hold governance structures accountable through collective action. He asked how groups can leverage control of data and the potential implications of data leverage on social structures and technical development.
How can communities develop and understand accountable governance? So many online environments rely on community members in profound ways without being accountable to them in direct ways. In this session, we will explore this topic and its implications for online communities and platforms.
First, Nick Vincent (Northwestern, UC Davis) will discuss the opportunities for so-called “data leverage” and will highlight the potential to push back on the “data status quo” to build compelling alternatives, including the potential for “data dividends” that allow a broader set of users to economically benefit from their contributions.
The idea of “data leverage” comes out of a basic, but little discussed fact: Many technologies are highly reliant on content and behavioral traces created by everyday Internet users, and particularly online community members who contribute text, images, code, editorial judgement, rankings, ratings, and more.. The technologies that rely on these resources include ubiquitous and familiar tools like search engines as well as new bleeding edge “Generative AI” systems that produce novel art, prose, code and more. Because these systems rely on contributions from Internet users, collective action by these users (for instance, withholding content) has the potential to impact system performance and operators.
Next, Amy Zhang (University of Washington) will discuss how communities can think about their governance and the ways in which the distribution of power and decision-making are encoded into the online community software that communities use. She will then describe a tool called PolicyKit that has been developed with the aim of breaking out of common top-down models for governance in online communities to enable governance models that are more open, transparent, and democratic. PolicyKit works by integrating with a community’s platform(s) of choice for online participation (e.g., Slack, Github, Discord, Reddit, OpenCollective), and then provides tools for community members to create a wide range of governance policies and automatically carry out those policies on and across their home platforms. She will then conclude with a discussion of specific governance models and how they incorporate legitimacy and accountability in their design.
We had another Science of Community Dialogue! This most recent one was themed around informal learning, talking about communities as informal learning spaces and the sorts of tools and habits communities can adopt to help learners, mentors, and newcomers. We had presentations from Ruijia (Regina) Cheng (University of Washington, CDSC) and Dr. Denae Ford Robinson (Microsoft, University of Washington).
Regina Cheng covered three related research projects and relevant findings:
Ruijia Cheng and Benjamin Mako Hill. 2022. “Many Destinations, Many Pathways: A Quantitative Analysis of Legitimate Peripheral Participation in Scratch.” https://doi.org/10.1145/3555106
Ruijia Cheng, Sayamindu Dasgupta, and Benjamin Mako Hill. 2022. “How Interest-Driven Content Creation Shapes Opportunities for Informal Learning in Scratch: A Case Study on Novices’ Use of Data Structures.” https://doi.org/10.1145/3491102.3502124
Ruijia Cheng and Jenna Frens. 2022. “Feedback Exchange and Online Affinity: A Case Study of Online Fanfiction Writers.” https://doi.org/10.1145/3555127
Participants collaboratively put together three takeaways from Regina Cheng’s presentation.
We often talk about wanting to support “learning” in some general sense, but a critically important question to ask is “learning about what.” Let’s say we want people to learn three things A, B, and C. The kinds of actions or behaviors that support learning goal A often have no effect on B, and C. And sometimes they actively hurt it. We need to be more specific about what we want people to learn because there are tradeoffs.
Social support is wonderful in that users create examples and resources and answer questions. But it also has this narrowing effect. There’s a piling-on effect that makes it easier and easier (and more likely!) to learn the things that folks have learned before and less likely that people learn anything else.
Feedback is not about information transfer, it’s about relationships. To best promote learning, we should create rich, legitimate, inclusive social environment. These are perhaps good things to do anyway.
Dr. Denae Ford Robinson focused on free and open source software (FOSS) communities as a case study of learning communities. She covered theory, needs, and demonstrated tools designed to help with the mentorship and the learning process.
Community-driven settings like FOSS (and social-good oriented projects in particular) rely enormously on volunteers and/or people opting into participation in ways that create huge challenges related to promoting project sustainability: the most active participants are overloaded in a way that is a recipe for burnout.
The path to sustainability involves attracting, retaining, and then sustaining contributions and understanding these processes as both (a) part of the lifecycle of a user and (b) part of a set of dynamics and lifecycle within the community (e.g., dynamics of community growth).
Approach 1 involves providing new information to help maintainers understand how things are going in their communities. A lack of insight and easy access to data is a cause of inefficiency and burnout.
Approach 2 involves making specific, structured recommendations to maintainers based on the experience of others in the past to do things like add tags and to shape behavior.
Approach 3 involves automating aspects of identifying and recognizing work (and perhaps other tasks) as a way of promoting newcomer experiences and reducing the load on maintainers for doing that.
This event and some of the research presented in it were supported by multiple awards from the National Science Foundation (DGE-1842165; IIS-2045055; IIS-1908850; IIS-1910202), Northwestern University, the University of Washington, and Purdue University.
We recently held our second Community Dialogue around the theme of anonymity and privacy. Kaylea Champion presented on the role of anonymity in peer-contribution communities. Dr. Shruti Sannon joined us from the University of Michigan and talked about privacy in the gig economy.
What’s Anonymity Worth (Kaylea Champion)
Anonymity can protect and empower contributors in communities. Anonymity can make people feel safer or actually be safer. For example: Wikipedia editors who are working on controversial pages within contested geographies may be safer when they are able to contribute anonymously. Anonymous contribution is not without problems, as it can also empower trolls, harassers, and other bad actors. For more details, and actions you can take or policies to recommend within your communities, watch the video of Kaylea Champion’s presentation below.
Privacy and Surveillance in the Gig Economy (Dr. Shruti Sannon)
Gig workers can be asked or coerced to give up privacy in exchange for money through the design of the gig platforms they are using or by request of customers. Gig workers also use surveillance tools as a means of protecting themselves — some ride share drivers have cameras in their cars for this purpose. Dr. Sannon shared the broader implications of this situation, and what it can mean outside of the gig economy. To learn more, watch the video below.
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Acknowledgements
Thanks to speakers Kaylea Champion and Shruti Sannon. The vision for this event borrows from the User and Open Innovation workshops organized by Eric von Hippel and colleagues, as well as others. This event and the research presented in it were supported by multiple awards from the National Science Foundation (DGE-1842165; IIS-2045055; IIS-1908850; IIS-1910202), Northwestern University, the University of Washington, and Purdue University.
This winter, the Community Data Science Collective launched a Community Dialogues series. These are meetings in which we invite community experts, organizers, and researchers to get together to share their knowledge of community practices and challenges, recent research, and how that research can be applied to support communities. We had our first meeting in February, with presentations from Jeremy Foot and Sohyeon Hwang on small communities and Nate TeBlunthius and Charlie Keine on overlapping communities.
Here are some quick summaries of the presentations. After the presentations, we formed small groups to discuss how what we learned related to our own experiences and knowledge of communities.
Finding Success in Small Communities
Small communities often stay small, medium stay medium, and big stay big. Meteoric growth is uncommon. User control and content curation improves user experience. Small communities help people define their expectations. Participation in small communities is often very salient and help participants build group identity, but not personal relationships. Growth doesn’t mean success, and we need to move beyond that and solely using quantitative metrics to judge our success. Being small can be a feature, not a bug!
We built a list of discussion questions collaboratively. It included:
Are you actively trying to attract new members to your community? Why or why not?
How do you approach scale/size in your community/communities?
Do you experience pressure to grow? From where? Towards what end?
What kinds of connections do people seek in the community/communities you are a part of?
Can you imagine designs/interventions to draw benefits from small communities or sub-communities within larger projects/communities?
How to understand/set community members’ expectations regarding community size?
“Small communities promote group identity but not interpersonal relationships.” This seems counterintuitive.
How do you managing challenges around growth incentives/pressures?
Why People Join Multiple Communities
People join topical clusters of communities, which have more mutualistic relationships than competitive ones. There is a trilemma (like a dilemma) between large audience, specific content, and homophily (likemindness). No community can do everything, and it may be better for participants and communities to have multiple, overlapping spaces. This can be more engaging, generative, fulfilling, and productive. People develop portfolios of communities, which can involve many small communities..
Questions we had for each other:
Do members of your community also participate in similar communities?
What other communities are your members most often involved in?
Are they “competing” with you? Or “mutualistic” in some way?
In what other ways do they relate to your community?
There is a “trilemma” between the largest possible audience, specific content, and homophilous (likeminded/similar folks) community. Where does your community sit inside this trilemma?
You can subscribe to our mailing list! We’ll be making announcements about future events there. It will be a low volume mailing list.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to speakers Charlie Kiene, Jeremy Foote, Nate TeBlunthius, and Sohyeon Hwang! Kaylea Champion was heavily involved in planning and decision making. The vision for the event borrows from the User and Open Innovation workshops organized by Eric von Hippel and colleagues, as well as others. This event and the research presented in it were supported by multiple awards from the National Science Foundation (DGE-1842165; IIS-2045055; IIS-1908850; IIS-1910202), Northwestern University, the University of Washington, and Purdue University.
Session summaries and questions above were created collaboratively by event attendees.
