Background: Although some previous research has found ways to find inclusivity bugs (biases in software that introduce inequities among cognitively diverse individuals), little attention has been paid to how to go about fixing such bugs. We hypothesized that Information Architecture (IA)--the way information is organized, structured and labeled--may provide the...
This article describes the motivation, design, and progress of the Journal of Open Source Software (JOSS). JOSS is a free and open-access journal that publishes articles describing research software. It has the dual goals of improving the quality of the software submitted and providing a mechanism for research software developers...
Software (OSS) communities and that women disproportionately experience such barriers. However, this research has focused mainly on social/cultural factors, ignoring the environment itself — the tools and infrastructure. To shed some light onto how tools and infrastructure might somehow factor into OSS barriers to entry, we conducted a field study...
Open Source software gives users the freedom to copy, modify and redistribute source code without legal entanglements. The evolution of these software communities usually depend a lot on how the participating developers and users interact and co-operate with each other. Over the past few years, open source software have become...
An age-wave is upon us where many older adults are reaching retirement. Technically experienced older adults have skills that could be directly applied to free/open source software (FOSS) communities, such as project management, programming, and/or knowledge of a rapidly growing end-user population. FOSS is a widely popular, low-cost way to...
Free / Open Source Software developers come from a myriad of different backgrounds. While some contribute for personal reasons, many become involved because they receive compensation from corporations or foundations. The motivation for participating in a project can have dramatic impacts on how and what contribution an individual makes. These...
Free and open source software (FOSS) projects primarily rely on the efforts of volunteer contributors from around the world. For this reason, recruiting and retaining contributor is vital to the sustainability and growth of FOSS projects. This notion became the jumping-off point for this three-part investigation into the cultural structure...
Open Source Software (OSS) communities are homogenous and their lack of diversity is of concern to many within this field. This problem is becoming more pronounced as it is the practice of many technology companies to use OSS participation as a factor in the hiring process, disadvantaging those who are...
Programmers often have to choose components online for reuse based on software quality. To help with this choice, most component repositories (SourceForge, CodeProject, etc.) provide information such as user ratings and reviews of components. However, the reusability of components is not immediately obvious from
this material. To make things worse,...
Free/Open Source Software (FOSS) communities often use open bug reporting to allow users to participate by reporting bugs. This practice can lead to more duplicate reports, as inexperienced users can be less rigorous about researching existing bug reports. The purpose of this research is to determine the extent of this...