Which contributions count? Analysis of attribution in open source

TL;DR

This paper examines how different models of contributor acknowledgment in open source projects, especially the All Contributors system, influence the visibility and boundaries of contributions beyond traditional commit-based metrics.

Contribution

It provides an analysis of the All Contributors model and compares it with other acknowledgment methods, highlighting its impact on recognizing diverse contributions.

Findings

Community systems highlight diverse contributions like outreach and idea generation.

Explicit attribution models define clearer boundaries of contribution.

All Contributors model offers a broader view of collaboration.

Abstract

Open source software projects usually acknowledge contributions with text files, websites, and other idiosyncratic methods. These data sources are hard to mine, which is why contributorship is most frequently measured through changes to repositories, such as commits, pushes, or patches. Recently, some open source projects have taken to recording contributor actions with standardized systems; this opens up a unique opportunity to understand how community-generated notions of contributorship map onto codebases as the measure of contribution. Here, we characterize contributor acknowledgment models in open source by analyzing thousands of projects that use a model called All Contributors to acknowledge diverse contributions like outreach, finance, infrastructure, and community management. We analyze the life cycle of projects through this model's lens and contrast its representation of contributorship with the picture given by other methods of acknowledgment, including GitHub's top committers indicator and contributions derived from actions taken on the platform. We find that community-generated systems of contribution acknowledgment make work like idea generation or bug finding more visible, which generates a more extensive picture of collaboration. Further, we find that models requiring explicit attribution lead to more clearly defined boundaries around what is and what is not a contribution.