The Impacts of Organizational Interventions in Open Source Software Engineering

The Impacts of Organizational Interventions in Open Source Software Engineering

Please read the Virtual Event Code of Conduct. We will be recording the event presentations, but not discussions.

This event will take place November 7, 2025 at 12pm to 2pm CT. It will feature Professor Igor Steinmacher (Northern Arizona University) and Matt Gaughan (Northwestern University). Register now!

How do free/libre and open source software (FLOSS) projects change their work processes to recruit new contributors and build the project communities that they want? Organizations such as GitHub, the Linux Foundation, and Mozilla provide general best practices for the governance and structure of FLOSS projects. Yet project growth can lead to rapid shifts in organizational needs: the collaboration processes that might work for a project one month may suddenly not work in the next. To support projects' decision making within changing contexts, researchers should study the impacts of governance interventions within specific moments in a project's development. This community dialogue will explore how FLOSS projects redesign collaboration processes within different environments and eras in their lifecycle.

Matt Gaughan will discuss how FLOSS projects depart from common recommendations when first introducing new documentation. Although institutional actors advocate for documentation as anticipatory tools for new contributions, this work finds that projects seem to use first-versions of documentation to 'get the house in order,' either publishing empty files to perform project hygiene or publishing contribution guidelines only following an influx of activity. These findings highlight the disconnect between general institutional recommendations and contextualized project actions. This research, co-authored with Kaylea Champion, Sohyeon Hwang, and Aaron Shaw, suggests that more specific design recommendations are necessary to meaningfully support FLOSS project governance.

Igor Steinmacher will discuss interventions to support FLOSS newcomers' onboarding, including community-driven mentorship strategies, structured contribution paths, and other approaches designed to build confidence and skills early in the contribution process. He will present recent work supporting the redevelopment of the data.table project's governance model. In this case study, a governance shift in the project was accompanied by investments in multilingual documentation and structured issue triage---steps that revitalized participation and distributed responsibility. The findings from this project and others support a holistic vision for building more sustainable, inclusive, and resilient FOSS communities, combining technical scaffolding, community design, and human-centered practices.

Speaker Bios

• Matt Gaughan (he/him) is a PhD Student in Technology and Social Behavior at Northwestern University. He works with the Community Data Science Collective and the CollabLab. His research interests lie in how the governance of open source software projects impact the discussions, contributions, and engineering that builds digital public goods. His current work focuses on how changes to engineering procedure adapt FLOSS projects to their environments, redefining project structure. In his free time, he enjoys reading, jogging, and swimming in Lake Michigan.

• Dr. Igor Steinmacher is an Associate Professor in the School of Informatics, Computing, and Cyber Systems at Northern Arizona University. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of São Paulo (2015) and was a Visiting Scholar at the University of California, Irvine (2013). His research focuses on supporting newcomers to open source and sustaining open source communities over time. He investigates socio-technical challenges in onboarding, mentoring, and community retention, and explores how AI-driven tools can promote inclusion and long-term project sustainability. His work bridges software engineering, HCI, and computing education, an he has authored over 100 peer-reviewed publications.

This event is organized by the Community Data Science Collective and hosted and supported, in part, by a National Science Foundation grant (IIS-2045055) so that it will be held at no cost to attendees. A code of conduct will be shared with participants prior to the event. Discussions will be held under Chatham House Rule. Presentations will be recorded, though discussions will not.