A grounded theory of Community Package Maintenance Organizations-Registered Report

TL;DR

This study aims to develop a grounded theory explaining the emergence, functioning, and impact of Community Package Maintenance Organizations (CPMOs) in open source ecosystems, based on qualitative analysis of existing documents and future interviews.

Contribution

It introduces a grounded theory of CPMOs, providing insights into their formation, operation, and influence, which can guide developers and participants in open source communities.

Findings

Preliminary theory of CPMO emergence and operation

Identification of key factors influencing CPMO success

Insights into how CPMOs impact ecosystem health

Abstract

a) Context: In many programming language ecosystems, developers rely more and more on external open source dependencies, made available through package managers. Key ecosystem packages that go unmaintained create a health risk for the projects that depend on them and for the ecosystem as a whole. Therefore, community initiatives can emerge to alleviate the problem by adopting packages in need of maintenance. b) Objective: The goal of our study is to explore such community initiatives, that we will designate from now on as Community Package Maintenance Organizations (CPMOs) and to build a theory of how and why they emerge, how they function and their impact on the surrounding ecosystems. c) Method: To achieve this, we plan on using a qualitative methodology called Grounded Theory. We have begun applying this methodology, by relying on "extant" documents originating from several CPMOs. We present our preliminary results and the research questions that have emerged. We plan to answer these questions by collecting appropriate data (theoretical sampling), in particular by contacting CPMO participants and questioning them by e-mails, questionnaires or semi-structured interviews. d) Impact: Our theory should inform developers willing to launch a CPMO in their own ecosystem and help current CPMO participants to better understand the state of the practice and what they could do better.