FOSSY (2026)
The Community Data Science Collective organized the Science of Community track at FOSSY 2026, held August 6–9, 2026 at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. The track took place on Sunday, August 9, 2026.
The Pitch[edit]
Although scholars publish hundreds of papers about free and open source software, online governance, licensing, and other topics very relevant to FOSS communities each year, much of this work never makes it out of academic journals and conferences and back to FOSS communities. At the same time, FOSS communities have a range of insights, questions, and data that researchers studying FOSS could benefit from enormously.
This gap between research and communities inspired us to propose a track at FOSSY, the Free and Open Source Software Yearly conference. Our track is called Science of Community.
The goal of this track is to build bridges between FOSS communities and scientific research conducted with and about FOSS communities. We aim to provide opportunities for community members to hear about exciting results from researchers; opportunities for researchers to learn from FOSS community members; and spaces for the FOSS community to think together about how to improve FOSS projects by drawing on research insights.
The track includes opportunities for:
- researchers to talk with practitioners (about their research)
- practitioners to talk with researchers (about their needs)
- researchers to talk with other researchers (for learning and collaboration)
Program[edit]
Sunday, August 9, 2026:
| Time | Session | Speaker(s) |
|---|---|---|
| 10:45 | Community Event Organizing | Michael Dexter |
| 11:45 | Lessons from Three Feature Deployments in a Stewarded Open Source Project | Matthew Gaughan |
| 14:00 | Revival Retrospective: Fedora KDE | Neal Gompa |
| 15:00 | Designing attestations UI: The Security and Safety of OSS package supply chain | Eriol Fox |
| 15:25 | Lowering Barriers in Open Source: AI-Supported Onboarding with CommUnityBuddy | Pedro Oliveira, Igor Steinmacher |
| 16:30 | Mopping Up the Slop: How bad is it, and what can we do? | Kaylea Champion |
Audience[edit]
FOSSY brings together a multi-disciplinary audience of free and open source software practitioners including community managers, designers, legal experts, non-profit and project leaders, technical developers, technical writers, and researchers.
Organizers[edit]
The track was organized by:
- Kaylea Champion, Community Data Science Collective and the University of Washington
- Matt Gaughan, Community Data Science Collective and Northwestern University
- Benjamin Mako Hill, Community Data Science Collective and the University of Washington
- Aaron Shaw, Community Data Science Collective and Northwestern University
Previous Years[edit]
- FOSSY (2025): Page from the version run in 2025.
- FOSSY (2024): Page from the version run in 2024.
- FOSSY (2023): Page from the version run in 2023.
