Leaving My Fingerprints: Motivations and Challenges of Contributing to OSS for Social Good

A Tale of Two Cities: Software Developers in Practice During the COVID-19 Pandemic

A Tale of Two Cities: Software Developers in Practice During the COVID-19 Pandemic—Dr. Denae Ford Robinson, Invited Seminar @ CMU HCII

The mass shift to working from home during the COVID-19 pandemic radically changed the way many software development teams collaborate, communicate, and define productivity. Since the early months of the pandemic, we have been collecting data on changes in developer productivity, pivots in strategy to remote onboarding, and recommendations on how to better support work during this time along social and technical axes. In this talk, I will present findings from several empirical studies with over 4,509 responses about the challenges and triumphs software developers have had amidst unconventional work-from-home circumstances and how some developers have taken the pandemic as a call to use their technical abilities to support a broader social good. I will close with open questions about hybrid technical work and how remote work will continue to evolve.

Speaker’s bio:

Dr. Denae Ford Robinson is a Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research in the SAINTes group and an Affiliate Assistant Professor in the Human Centered Design and Engineering Department at the University of Washington. Her research lies at the intersection of Human-Computer Interaction and Software Engineering. In her work, she identifies and dismantles cognitive and social barriers by designing mechanisms to support software developer participation in online socio-technical ecosystems. She is best known for her research on just-in-time mentorship as a mode to empower welcoming engagement in collaborative Q&A for online programming communities, including open-source software and work to empower marginalized software developers in online communities.

She received her B.S. and M.S. in Computer Science from North Carolina State University. She also received her Ph.D. in Computer Science and Graduate Minor in Cognitive Science from North Carolina State University. She is also a recipient of the National GEM Consortium Fellowship, National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, and Microsoft Research Ph.D. Fellowship. Her research publications can be found under her pen name ‘Denae Ford’. More information about her latest research can be found on her website: http://denaeford.me/ (opens in new tab)

Leaving My Fingerprints: Motivations and Challenges of Contributing to OSS for Social Good

ICSE 2021 Conference Presentation by former MSR Intern Yu Huang

Title: Leaving My Fingerprints: Motivations and Challenges of Contributing to OSS for Social Good

Abstract: When inspiring software developers to contribute to open source software, the act is often referenced as an opportunity to build tools to support the developer community. However, that is not the only charge that propels contributions—growing interest in open source has also been attributed to software developers deciding to use their technical skills to benefit a common societal good. To understand how developers identify these projects, their motivations for contributing, and challenges they face, we conducted 21 semi-structured interviews with OSS for Social Good (OSS4SG) contributors. From our interview analysis, we identified themes of contribution styles that we wanted to understand at scale by deploying a survey to over 5765 OSS and Open Source Software for Social Good contributors. From our quantitative analysis of 517 responses, we find that the majority of contributors demonstrate a distinction between OSS4SG and OSS. Likewise, contributors described definitions based on what societal issue the project was to mitigate and who the the outcomes of the project were going to benefit. In addition, we find that OSS4SG contributors focus less on benefiting themselves by padding their resume with new technology skills and are more interested in leaving their mark on society at statistically significant levels. We also find that OSS4SG contributors evaluate the owners of the project significantly more than OSS contributors. These findings inform implications to help contributors identify high societal impact projects, help project maintainers reduce barriers to entry, and help organizations understand why contributors are drawn to these projects to sustain active participation.

Denae Ford (Microsoft Research), Thomas Zimmermann (Microsoft Research), Yu Huang (University of Michigan),

* IEEE Digital Library: https://www.computer.org/csdl/proceedings-article/icse/2021/029600b020/1sEXoTECNKE

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Developer Tech Minutes: Open Source Software for Social Good

Join Senior Researcher, Denae Ford Robinson from Microsoft Research as she discusses Project Open Source Software for Social Good (OSS4SG). This project investigates how developers understand social good within the open-source space, how they select OSS4SG projects, and the participation challenges they face. It ultimately helps identify ways to better support and match devs to OSS projects that seek to improve society.

For an interactive walkthrough of resources visit the Tech Minutes Hub for this video: https://innovation.microsoft.com/en-us/tech-minutes-oss-for-social-good (opens in new tab)

To learn more about the latest Dev breakthroughs, visit the Innovation Tech Hub: https://innovation.microsoft.com/en-us/developer (opens in new tab)

Learn more about the project on the OSS4SG Microsoft Research Page: https://jokerchen.me/en-us/research/project/oss-for-social-good/ (opens in new tab)

Check out the GitHub Social Impact website: https://socialimpact.github.com/ (opens in new tab)

Read the latest Octoverse Community Report: https://octoverse.github.com/#community (opens in new tab)

Discover all the Innovation Tech Minutes for Developers: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLlrxD0HtieHjNJcVCIktce-wSFZ5svwA3 (opens in new tab)