Category: FOSSY

Let the countdown begin! FOSSY 2025 begins next week July 31st through August 3rd. We’ll be there, running the Science of Community track on Friday, August 1st and Saturday August 2nd.

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.

We have a number of great presenters, including the CDSC’s very own Matt Gaughan and Dr. Kaylea Champion. You can check our full schedule below:

Tickets are still available at every price tier, check them out here.

We’ll you there!

Does your work touch open source, communities, technology, or cooperation? Do you want to help bridge the gaps between research and practice? Join us at FOSSY! The Free and Open Source Software Yearly conference (FOSSY) is back this summer and the call for proposals is open!

“I always enjoy the blend of researcher and contributor perspectives in the Science of Community track. The presentations are always great, surpassed only by the follow up conversations in the hall afterwards!” – Matt Gaughan, CDSC member and PhD student

We’ll be running the Science of Community track, and are looking for presenters to speak to an audience of FOSS practitioners, developers, community organizers, contributors, and people just generally into and curious about FOSS. 

The Science of Community track is inspired by the CDSC Science of Community Dialogues, which bring together practitioners and researchers to discuss scholarly work that is relevant to the efforts of practitioners. As researchers, we benefit 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 will focus on how that work relates to free and open source software communities, projects, and practitioners.

FOSSY is a low-stress opportunity to talk to people who your work can benefit. For topics, consider presenting implications from past papers, synthesizing work from your field overall, or floating ideas and problems (lightning talks! long talks! short talks!). A full track description and answers to common questions is available on our wiki.

The CFP deadline is April 28th and uses this form.

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.

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.

In the fifth talk of the Science of Community track we organized for FOSSY, Dr. Kaylea Champion describes a series of research results on both how to build high-quality FOSS and how to sustain a community alongside it. One of her key insights is that a great community is no guarantee of a high-quality project — and to serve the public, we need both.

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.