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An Empirical Study of the Apache Voting Process on Open Source Community Governance

Published: 05 October 2023 Publication History

Abstract

Open-source software (OSS) projects have become a cornerstone of the software ecosystem, offering numerous benefits to developers and end-users alike. However, ensuring the long-term sustainability and success of OSS projects is challenging, requiring effective community engagement and mentorship. Previous studies have demonstrated that OSS projects benefit from having a larger number of members and an active community, as measured by communication and code contributions. The sustainability of OSS projects must require an effective approach to community governance. In the projects of the Apache Software Foundation Incubator (ASFI), voting plays an important role in community governance, which makes the decision-making process transparent and democratic. Therefore, our study aims to investigate the association between the voting process during the incubation period and the final outcomes of projects (graduated or retired) within ASFI. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive analysis of the voting process in the ASF projects based on a large-scale data set of the mailing list from 272 sustainability-labeled ASF Incubator projects. We compute various metrics related to voting and investigate whether there are significant differences between graduated and retired projects based on these metrics. We also employ an approach to detect episodic changes based on these voting metrics. Our objective is to examine whether episodic changes in the voting process have a significant impact on the sustainability and success of the project. Our findings reveal that the voting process in the ASF Incubator is closely related to project outcomes, with graduated projects generally exhibiting higher interest and more stability of voting. In practice, these results can help practitioners and project mentors better understand the impact of the voting process on OSS project outcomes and inform strategies to foster a more conducive environment for project success and sustainability within the ASF Incubator and beyond.

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    Internetware '23: Proceedings of the 14th Asia-Pacific Symposium on Internetware
    August 2023
    332 pages
    ISBN:9798400708947
    DOI:10.1145/3609437
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    Published: 05 October 2023

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    Author Tags

    1. Apache Incubator
    2. Mining Software Repository
    3. OSS Sustainability

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