Episodic Participation in Open Source Software Development

#Open #source #software #development #young #professionals #women #in #engineering

Increasingly, people want to contribute to open source software projects casually (episodically). A number of factors have driven this change, such as distributed revision control, social coding platforms, and the general trend towards “new volunteerism.” To take advantage of these contributions, communities need to adapt to the needs and expectations of episodic contributors. Yet at the same time, no community wants to invest more effort in inviting episodic contributions than it receives in return. This talk will cover research on the factors influencing retention of episodic participants, and best practices for engaging them.

Speaker Bio:

Dr. Ann Barcomb is an assistant professor at the Schulich School of Engineering, University of Calgary. Her previous post was at Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany. Dr. Barcomb received her PhD from the University of Limerick, Ireland, in 2019, with a specialization in software engineering, and a master's in information systems from Maastricht University, The Netherlands. In the course of her industry career, she worked as a software developer for multiple firms and as a community manager for RIPE NCC. From the beginning, she has been active in free/libre/open source software, organizing events, speaking at practitioner conferences, and writing for practitioner outlets.