Erik H. Trainer
Chalalai Chaihirunkarn
James D. Herbsleb
ABSTRACT
Community code engagements -- short-term, intensive software development events -- are used by some scientific communities to create new software features and promote community building. But there is as yet little empirical support for their effectiveness. This paper presents a qualitative study of two types of community code engagements: Google Summer of Code (GSoC) and hackathons. We investigated the range of outcomes these engagements produce and the underlying practices that lead to these outcomes. In GSoC, the vision and experience of core members of the community influence project selection, and the intensive mentoring process facilitates creation of strong ties. Most GSoC projects result in stable features. The agenda setting phase of hackathons reveals high priority issues perceived by the community. Social events among the relatively large numbers of participants over brief engagements tend to create weak ties. Most hackathons result in prototypes rather than finished tools. We discuss themes and tradeoffs that suggest directions for future empirical work around designing community code engagements.
- Altschul, S.F., Gish, W., Miller, W., Myers, E.W. and Lipman, D.J. 1990. Basic local alignment search tool. Journal of Molecular Biology. 215, (1990), 403--410.Google Scholar
- Atkins, D., Droegemeier, K., Feldman, S., Garcia-Molina, H., Klein, M., Messerschmitt, D., Messina, P., Ostriker, J. and Wright, M. 2003. Revolutionizing Science and Engineering Through Cyberinfrastructure: Report of the National Science Foundation Blue-Ribbon Advisory Panel on Cyberinfrastructure.Google Scholar
- Attracting and Retaining Participants: 2010. http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Attracting_and_retaining_participants. Accessed: 2014-02-02.Google Scholar
- Biopython Google Summer of Code: http://biopython.org/wiki/Google_Summer_of_Code. Accessed: 2014-06--13.Google Scholar
- Blatecky, A. and Messerschmitt, D. 2005. Planning for Cyberinfrastructure Software.Google Scholar
- Christopherson, L., Idaszak, R. and Ahalt, S. 2013. Developing Scientific Software through the Open Community Engagement Process.Google Scholar
- Cock, P.J. a, Antao, T., Chang, J.T., Chapman, B. a, Cox, C.J., Dalke, A., Friedberg, I., Hamelryck, T., Kauff, F., Wilczynski, B. and de Hoon, M.J.L. 2009. Biopython: freely available Python tools for computational molecular biology and bioinformatics. Bioinformatics (Oxford, England). 25, 11 (Jun. 2009), 1422--3. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Codefest: http://www.open-bio.org/wiki/Codefest. Accessed: 2014-06--13.Google Scholar
- Colwell, R. 2000. Information Technology: Ariadne's Thread Through the Research and Education Labyrinth. Educause. June (2000), 15--18.Google Scholar
- Corbin, J. and Strauss, J. 2008. Basics of Qualitative Research: Techniques and Procedures for Developing Grounded Theory. Sage.Google Scholar
- Cranston, K. and Evolutionary, N. 2013. A grassroots approach to software sustainability. Proc. Workshop in Sustainable Software for Science: Practice and Experience (WSSSPE) (2013).Google Scholar
- Crowston, K., Wei, K., Howison, J. and Wiggins, A. 2012. Free/Libre open-source software development: what we know and what we do not know. ACM Computing Surveys. 44, 2 (Feb. 2012), 1--35. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Dabbish, L., Stuart, C., Tsay, J. and Herbsleb, J. 2012. Social Coding in GitHub: Transparency and Collaboration in an Open Software Repository. Proceedings of the ACM 2012 conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (2012), 1277--1286. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Database Interop Hackathon: https://www.nescent.org/wg/evoinfo/index.php?title=Database_Interop_Hackathon. Accessed: 2014-06--13.Google Scholar
- Ducheneaut, N. 2005. Socialization in an Open Source Software Community: A Socio-Technical Analysis. Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW). 14, 4 (Jul. 2005), 323--368. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Fabri, A. and Pion, S. 2009. CGAL: the Computational Geometry Algorithms Library. Proceedings of the 17th ACM SIGSPATIAL International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems (2009), 538--539. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Fang, Y. and Neufeld, D. 2009. Understanding Sustained Participation in Open Source Software Projects. Journal of Management Information Systems. 25, 4 (Apr. 2009), 9--50. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Gaertner, S. and Dovidio, J. 2000. Reducing intergroup conflict: From superordinate goals to decategorization, recategorization, and mutual differentiation. Group Dynamics: Theory, Research, and Practice. 4, 1 (2000), 98--114.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Gentleman, R.C. et al. 2004. Bioconductor: open software development for computational biology and bioinformatics. Genome biology. 5, 10 (Jan. 2004), R80.Google Scholar
- Google Summer of Code: 2013. https://developers.google.com/open-source/soc/?csw=1. Accessed: 2014-01--31.Google Scholar
- Granovetter, M. 1973. The Strength of Weak Ties. American journal of sociology. 78, 6 (1973).Google Scholar
- Hackathon: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hackathon. Accessed: 2014-02--12.Google Scholar
- Halfaker, A., Kittur, A. and Riedl, J. 2011. Don't Bite the Newbies: How Reverts Affect the Quantity and Quality of Wikipedia Work. Proceedings of the 7th International Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration (2011), 163--172. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Henri, F. and Pudelko, B. 2003. Understanding and analysing activity and learning in virtual communities. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning. October 2002 (2003), 474--487.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Howison, J. and Herbsleb, J.D. 2013. Incentives and integration in scientific software production. Proceedings of the ACM 2013 conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (New York, New York, USA, 2013), 459--468. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Howison, J. and Herbsleb, J.D. 2011. Scientific software production: incentives and collaboration. Proceedings of the ACM 2011 conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (2011), 513--522. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Jirotka, M., Procter, R., Rodden, T. and Bowker, G.C. 2006. Special Issue: Collaboration in e-Research. Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW). 15, (Sep. 2006), 251--255. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Katayama, T. et al. 2011. The 2nd DBCLS BioHackathon: interoperable bioinformatics Web services for integrated applications. Journal of biomedical semantics. 2, 4 (Jan. 2011), 1--18.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Katayama, T. et al. 2010. The DBCLS BioHackathon: standardization and interoperability for bioinformatics web services and workflows. Journal of Biomedical Semantics. 1, 8 (2010), 1--19.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Kraut, R.E. and Resnick, P. 2011. Building Successful Online Communities. MIT Press. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Von Krogh, G., Spaeth, S. and Lakhani, K.R. 2003. Community, joining, and specialization in open source software innovation: a case study. Research Policy. 32, 7 (Jul. 2003), 1217--1241.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Lapp, H., Bala, S., Balhoff, J.P., Bouck, A., Goto, N., Holland, R., Holloway, A., Katayama, T., Lewis, P.O., Mackey, A.J., Osborne, B.I., Piel, W.H. and Pond, S.L.K. 2007. The 2006 NESCent Phyloinformatics Hackathon: A Field Report. Evolutionary Bioinformatics. 3, (2007), 287--296.Google Scholar
- Lave, J. and Wenger, E. 1990. Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation. Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
- OpenScience Software: http://openscience.org/links/. Accessed: 2014-01--31.Google Scholar
- Phylotastic1: http://www.evoio.org/wiki/Phylotastic1. Accessed: 2014-06--13.Google Scholar
- Pico, A.R., Kelder, T., van Iersel, M.P., Hanspers, K., Conklin, B.R. and Evelo, C. 2008. WikiPathways: Pathway Editing for the People. PLoS Biology. 6, 7 (2008), e184.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Proteomics Data Analysis with CloudBioLinux: http://mass-spec-data-analysis-with-cloudbiolinux.readthedocs.org/en/latest/. Accessed: 2014-06--13.Google Scholar
- Ribes, D. and Lee, C.P. 2010. Sociotechnical Studies of Cyberinfrastructure and e-Research: Current Themes and Future Trajectories. Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW). 19, 3--4 (Sep. 2010), 231--244. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Schroeder, W.J., Martin, K.M. and Lorensen, W.E. The design and implementation of an object-oriented toolkit for 3D graphics and visualization. Proceedings of the 7th conference on Visualization 93--100. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Segal, J. 2009. Software Development Cultures and Cooperation Problems: A Field Study of the Early Stages of Development of Software for a Scientific Community. Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW). 18, 5--6 (Sep. 2009), 581--606. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Shah, S. 2006. Motivation, Governance, and the Viability of Hybrid Forms in Open Source Software Development. Management Science. 52, 7 (2006), 1000--1014. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Shannon, P., Markiel, A., Ozier, O., Baliga, N.S., Wang, J.T., Ramage, D., Amin, N., Schwikowski, B. and Ideker, T. 2003. Cytoscape: a software environment for integrated models of biomolecular interaction networks. Genome research. 13, 11 (Nov. 2003), 2498--504.Google Scholar
- SocioCultural Research Consultants, L. 2013. Dedoose Version 4.5, web application for managing, analyzing, and presenting qualitative and mixed method research data.Google Scholar
- Stewart, C.A., Almes, G.T., McCaulay, S. and Wheeler, B.C. eds. 2010. Cyberinfrastructure Software Sustainability and Reusability. Indiana University.Google Scholar
- Sundberg, M. 2010. Organizing Simulation Code Collectives. Science studies: an interdisciplinary journal for science and technology studies. 23, 1 (2010), 37--57.Google Scholar
- SWAT4LS 2012: http://www.w3.org/wiki/HCLS/SWAT4LS2012/Hackathon. Accessed: 2014-06--13.Google Scholar
- Trainer, E., Chaihirunkarn, C. and Herbsleb, J. 2013. The big effects of short-term efforts: A catalyst for community engagement in scientific software. Proc. Workshop in Sustainable Software for Science: Practice and Experience (WSSSPE). (2013).Google Scholar
- Trainer, E.H., Chaihirunkarn, C., Kalyanasundaram, A. and Herbsleb, J.D. 2015. From Personal Tool to Community Resource: What's the Extra Work and Who Will Do It? Proceedings of the ACM 2015 Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing (2015), to appear.Google Scholar
- Use Cases: http://informatics.nescent.org/wiki/UseCases. Accessed: 2014-06--13.Google Scholar
- Worchel, S., Rothgerber, H., Day, E., Hart, D. and Butemeyer, J. 1998. Social identity and individual productivity within groups. British Journal of Social Psychology. 37, (1998), 389--414.Google Scholar
- Working towards Sustainable Software for Science: Practice and Experiences: 2013. http://wssspe.researchcomputing.org.uk. Accessed: 2014-01--31.Google Scholar
Index Terms
- Community Code Engagements: Summer of Code & Hackathons for Community Building in Scientific Software
Recommendations
How to Hackathon: Socio-technical Tradeoffs in Brief, Intensive Collocation
CSCW '16: Proceedings of the 19th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work & Social ComputingHackathons are events where people who are not normally collocated converge for a few days to write code together. Hackathons, it seems, are everywhere. We know that long- term collocation helps advance technical work and facilitate enduring ...
10 Years of Research With and On Hackathons
DIS '20: Proceedings of the 2020 ACM Designing Interactive Systems ConferenceHackathon formats have been praised for their potential for promoting innovative thinking and making in a short time-frame. For this reason, hackathons have also been embraced by many researchers who use hackathons as part of their research in various ...
Barriers and Benefits: The Path to Accessible Makerspaces
ASSETS '23: Proceedings of the 25th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and AccessibilityMotivated by the philosophical overlap between makerspace culture and the needs of assistive technology users, we investigated the ways that makerspaces can support the development of new technologies by and for disabled makers. Using eleven semi-...
Comments