Attracting and Retaining OSS Contributors with a Maintainer Dashboard

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. LAY ABSTRACT Open Source Software (OSS) plays an important role in the development and maintenance of software products that are widely deployed in different domains from computer science to astrophysics and cut-ting edge medicines research. Chances are there is an open source project for anyone to contribute to. With the recent deployment of the popular Linux open source project on Mars even the sky is no limit. However, OSS projects largely depend on volunteers and attracting, retaining, and keeping contributors engaged is a severe challenge. In this paper, we present the design and evaluation of a dashboard to support community managers, such as maintainers, to track and acknowledge newcomers‘ contributions. With the support of tools such as ours, maintainers will be better prepared to attract and retain their emerging community.