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Volunteer Attraction and Retention in Open Source Communities

Published: 27 August 2014 Publication History

Abstract

The importance of volunteers in open source has led to the position of community manager becoming more common in foundations and projects. Yet the advice for volunteer management and retention is fragmented, incomplete, contradictory, and has not been empirically examined. Our aim is to fill this gap by creating a comprehensive guidebook of best practices drawing from open source practitioner guides and general literature on volunteering, and to subject a subset of practices to empirical study. A method for evaluating volunteer attrition in terms of value to the organization will also be developed.

References

[1]
W. Bowman. The economic value of volunteers to nonprofit organizations. Nonprofit Management and Leadership, 19(4):491--506, 2009.
[2]
L. M. Bryen and K. M. Madden. Bounce-Back of Episodic Volunteers: What makes episodic volunteers return? Working Paper No. CPNS 32. QUT, 2006.
[3]
M. Capraro. Towards a representative and diverse analysis of issue-tracker related code and process metrics, 2013.
[4]
F. Chacon, M. L. Vecina, and M. C. Davila. The three-stage model of volunteers'duration of service. Social Behavior & Personality: An International Journal, 35(5), 2007.
[5]
M. L. V. Jiménez, F. C. Fuertes, and M. J. S. Abad. Differences and similarities among volunteers who drop out during the first year and volunteers who continue after eight years. The Spanish journal of psychology, 13(01):343--352, 2010.
[6]
D. Riehle. The economic motivation of open source software: Stakeholder perspectives. Computer, 40(4):25--32, 2007.
[7]
D. Riehle. The open source developer career and its benefits. IEEE Computer, page to appear, 2014.
[8]
C.-G. Wu, J. H. Gerlach, and C. E. Young. An empirical analysis of open source software developers' motivations and continuance intentions. Information & Management, 44(3):253--262, 2007.

Cited By

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  • (2022)Will you come back to contribute? Investigating the inactivity of OSS core developers in GitHubEmpirical Software Engineering10.1007/s10664-021-10012-627:3Online publication date: 19-Mar-2022
  • (2019)Why do developers take breaks from contributing to OSS projects?Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Software Health10.1109/SoHeal.2019.00009(9-16)Online publication date: 28-May-2019

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Published In

cover image ACM Conferences
OpenSym '14: Proceedings of The International Symposium on Open Collaboration
August 2014
302 pages
ISBN:9781450330169
DOI:10.1145/2641580
Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author.

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In-Cooperation

  • TJEF: The John Ernest Foundation

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 27 August 2014

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Author Tags

  1. Community Management
  2. FLOSS
  3. Open Source
  4. Recruitment
  5. Service Duration
  6. Volunteer Management
  7. Volunteer Retention
  8. Volunteers

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  • Tutorial
  • Research
  • Refereed limited

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OpenSym '14

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OpenSym '14 Paper Acceptance Rate 29 of 64 submissions, 45%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 108 of 195 submissions, 55%

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Cited By

View all
  • (2022)Will you come back to contribute? Investigating the inactivity of OSS core developers in GitHubEmpirical Software Engineering10.1007/s10664-021-10012-627:3Online publication date: 19-Mar-2022
  • (2019)Why do developers take breaks from contributing to OSS projects?Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Software Health10.1109/SoHeal.2019.00009(9-16)Online publication date: 28-May-2019

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