Bots already have a strong presence in open source projects, helping contributors in their maintenance. Mostly, automating repetitive tasks. See a list of bots in software development. I think their importance will keep growing. In fact, I believe they could play a...
Participation inequality is a major challenge in any shared-resource system. This is known as the “volunteer’s dilemma”: everybody wants to benefit from a resource without contributing, expecting others will do the work. We set out ot explore whether this problem also...
SustainOSS is an initiative created about four years ago to discuss the main challenges in sustainability for Open Source Systems. The yearly SustainOSS event is maybe the most representative activity, but the initiative also supports a podcast and other resources...
In the last years, a number of Open-Source Systems (OSS) have created parallel foundations, as legal instruments to better articulate the structure, collaboration, and financial model for the project. Some examples are Apache, Linux, Mozilla, Eclipse or Django...
What if your software project loses the best developer? Who is the developer you can get rid of? I bet these are questions that all project managers ask themselves several times during the lifecycle of a software project. Developers are valuable resources for any...
A long time ago, Greg Wilson recommended reading The Discussion book: 50 great ways to get people talking. In fact, he went even further and proposed a research challenge to the Sofware Engineering / Computer Support Cooperative Work communities: score existing...
