Attracting and Retaining OSS Contributors with a Maintainer Dashboard

TL;DR

This paper introduces a maintainer dashboard designed to help open source projects attract and retain contributors by providing tailored recommendations, with initial evaluations showing its potential to foster a welcoming environment.

Contribution

It presents the first collaborative design and evaluation of a maintainer dashboard with tailored recommendations for OSS contributor growth.

Findings

Recommendations help signal welcoming projects.

Gently nudges maintainers to recognize contributors.

Design complexities depend on project development state.

Abstract

Tools and artifacts produced by open source software (OSS) have been woven into the foundation of the technology industry. To keep this foundation intact, the open source community needs to actively invest in sustainable approaches to bring in new contributors and nurture existing ones. We take a first step at this by collaboratively designing a maintainer dashboard that provides recommendations on how to attract and retain open source contributors. For example, by highlighting project goals (e.g., a social good cause) to attract diverse contributors and mechanisms to acknowledge (e.g., a "rising contributor" badge) existing contributors. Next, we conduct a project-specific evaluation with maintainers to better understand use cases in which this tool will be most helpful at supporting their plans for growth. From analyzing feedback, we find recommendations to be useful at signaling projects as welcoming and providing gentle nudges for maintainers to proactively recognize emerging contributors. However, there are complexities to consider when designing recommendations such as the project current development state (e.g., deadlines, milestones, refactoring) and governance model. Finally, we distill our findings to share what the future of recommendations in open source looks like and how to make these recommendations most meaningful over time.