Community Data Science Collective Research at DebConf 2021

Debian is one of the oldest, largest, and most influential peer production communities and has produced an operating system used by millions for over the last three decades. DebConf is that community’s annual meeting. This year, the Community Data Science Collective was out in force at Debian’s virtual conference to present several Debian-focused research projects that we’ve been working on.

First, Wm Salt Hale presented work from his master thesis project on “Resilience in FLOSS: Do founder decisions impact development activity after crisis events?” His work tried to understand the social dynamics behind organizational resilience among free software projects based on what Salt calls “founder decisions.” He did so by estimating the relationship between changes in developer activity after security bugs and testing several theories about how this relationship might vary between permissive and copyleft licensed software packages.

Next, Kaylea and Salt facilitated a “birds-of-a-feather” get-together session for FLOSS project founders (video is also available).

Finally, Kaylea Champion presented her work with Benjamin Mako Hill on “Detecting At Risk Software in Debian.” Her work described a new technique that involves identifying software packages that are less (or more) high quality than you we might expect given their popularity. You can read more about that work in our blog post from earlier this year.

If you saw either presentation and are interested in continuing the conversation, you are welcome to reach out to us individually ({kaylea OR halew}@uw.edu). You can also follow us on this blog, or follow or engage with us in the Fediverse (@communitydata@social.coop), or on Twitter (@comdatasci).