Neill Robson
ABSTRACT
Open source software communities are increasingly aware of how social biases and discrimination negatively affect their culture. Many choose to establish policies regulating their contributors' social interactions without considering the efficacy of such measures. If these communities lack an empirical awareness of their policies' impact, they may find themselves adopting dogmatic practices that serve only to increase overhead maintenance costs. Conducting a gender diversity analysis of popular open source projects, I discovered no significant change in the proportion of women contributing to projects with or without a code of conduct. In light of this discovery, the open source community should consider supplemental strategies in order to foster diverse participation in their projects.
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Cross Ref
- Andrew Kofink. 2015. Contributions of the Under-Appreciated: Gender Bias in an Open-Source Ecology. In Companion Proceedings of the 2015 ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Systems, Programming, Languages and Applications: Software for Humanity (SPLASH Companion 2015). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 83–84. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Joseph Reagle. 2013. “Free as in Sexist?” Free Culture and the Gender Gap. First Monday 18, 1 (2013).Google Scholar
- Josh Terrell, Andrew Kofink, Justin Middleton, Clarissa Rainear, Emerson Murphy-Hill, Chris Parnin, and Jon Stallings. 2017. Gender Differences and Bias in Open Source: Pull Request Acceptance of Women versus Men. PeerJ Computer Science 3 (May 2017), e111.Google Scholar
- P. Tourani, B. Adams, and A. Serebrenik. 2017. Code of Conduct in Open Source Projects. In 2017 IEEE 24th International Conference on Software Analysis, Evolution and Reengineering (SANER). 24–33. Abstract 1 Introduction 2 Methodology 3 Results 4 Discussion and Threats to Validity Acknowledgments ReferencesGoogle Scholar
Index Terms
- Diversity and decorum in open source communities
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