research-article

The many hats and the broken binoculars: State of the practice in developer community management

Authors:

Hanna Mäenpää,

Myriam Munezero,

Fabian Fagerholm,

Tommi MikkonenAuthors Info & Claims

OpenSym '17: Proceedings of the 13th International Symposium on Open Collaboration

Article No.: 18, Pages 1 - 9

https://doi.org/10.1145/3125433.3125474

Published: 23 August 2017 Publication History

Abstract

Open Source Software developer communities are susceptible to challenges related to volatility, distributed coordination and the interplay between commercial and ideological interests. Here, community managers play a vital role in growing, shepherding, and coordinating the developers' work. This study investigates the varied tasks that community managers perform to ensure the health and vitality of their communities. We describe the challenges managers face while directing the community and seeking support for their work from the analysis tools provided by state-of-the-art software platforms. Our results describe seven roles that community managers may play, highlighting the versatile and people-centric nature of the community manager's work. Managers experience hardship of connecting their goals, questions and metrics that define a community's health and effects of their actions. Our results voice common concerns among community managers, and can be used to help them structure the management activity and to find a theoretical frame for further research on how health of developer communities could be understood.

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Cited By

Chen HCai W(2024)A Comparative Analysis of Centralized and Decentralized Developer Autonomous Organizations Managing Conflicts in Discussing External CrisesIEEE Transactions on Computational Social Systems10.1109/TCSS.2023.324746411:6(8118-8129)Online publication date: Dec-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/TCSS.2023.3247464
Barcomb AStol KFitzgerald BRiehle D(2022)Managing Episodic Volunteers in Free/Libre/Open Source Software CommunitiesIEEE Transactions on Software Engineering10.1109/TSE.2020.298509348:1(260-277)Online publication date: 1-Jan-2022
https://doi.org/10.1109/TSE.2020.2985093
Viseur RCharleux A(2021)Open Source Communities and Forks: A Rereading in the Light of Albert Hirschman's WritingsOpen Source Systems10.1007/978-3-030-75251-4_6(59-67)Online publication date: 5-May-2021
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-75251-4_6
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

The many hats and the broken binoculars: State of the practice in developer community management
1. Information systems
2. Social and professional topics
  1. Professional topics
    1. Management of computing and information systems
      1. Software management

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cover image ACM Other conferences

OpenSym '17: Proceedings of the 13th International Symposium on Open Collaboration

August 2017

218 pages

ISBN:9781450351874

DOI:10.1145/3125433

General Chair:
Lorraine Morgan
National University of Ireland Galway

Copyright © 2017 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part 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 components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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Publication History

Published: 23 August 2017

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This work is funded partially by the Innovative Requirements Engineering Methods, Algorithms and Tools research project (OpenReq) that has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme.

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OpenSym '17

OpenSym '17: The 13th International Symposium on Open Collaboration

August 23 - 25, 2017

Galway, Ireland

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Overall Acceptance Rate 108 of 195 submissions, 55%

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Cited By

Chen HCai W(2024)A Comparative Analysis of Centralized and Decentralized Developer Autonomous Organizations Managing Conflicts in Discussing External CrisesIEEE Transactions on Computational Social Systems10.1109/TCSS.2023.324746411:6(8118-8129)Online publication date: Dec-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/TCSS.2023.3247464
Barcomb AStol KFitzgerald BRiehle D(2022)Managing Episodic Volunteers in Free/Libre/Open Source Software CommunitiesIEEE Transactions on Software Engineering10.1109/TSE.2020.298509348:1(260-277)Online publication date: 1-Jan-2022
https://doi.org/10.1109/TSE.2020.2985093
Viseur RCharleux A(2021)Open Source Communities and Forks: A Rereading in the Light of Albert Hirschman's WritingsOpen Source Systems10.1007/978-3-030-75251-4_6(59-67)Online publication date: 5-May-2021
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-75251-4_6
Viseur RCharleux A(2019)Changement de gouvernance et communautés open source : le cas du logiciel ClarolineInnovations10.3917/inno.058.0071N° 58:1(71-104)Online publication date: 14-Feb-2019
https://doi.org/10.3917/inno.058.0071
Lima Fontão ASantos RDias-Neto A(2019)Exploiting Repositories in Mobile Software Ecosystems from a Governance PerspectiveInformation Systems Frontiers10.1007/s10796-018-9861-821:1(143-161)Online publication date: 17-May-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/s10796-018-9861-8
Fontão AÁbia BWiese IEstácio BQuinta MSantos RDias-Neto A(2018)Supporting governance of mobile application developers from mining and analyzing technical questions in stack overflowJournal of Software Engineering Research and Development10.1186/s40411-018-0052-66:1Online publication date: 22-Aug-2018
https://doi.org/10.1186/s40411-018-0052-6

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