
Barriers faced by newcomers to open source projects: a systematic review [pdf] - cpeterso
http://www.igor.pro.br/publica/papers/OSS2014.pdf
======
tonglil
I think one issue that the paper didn't really tackle was the question new
contributors ask themselves when they want to contribute: "I don't want to
bother people with patches they could have written themselves faster or
better." ([http://marti.us/w/2014-07-19-Mozilla-
BSP.html](http://marti.us/w/2014-07-19-Mozilla-BSP.html))

When I first started out, I reported bugs, reproducible tests, and contributed
to issue discussions, but didn't write PRs because I felt as if my coding
style or complexity could not live up to the source. There is often a
intimidation factor when thinking about submitting code to the maintainers
(even though it is not on purpose).

Even now after contributing some code, I sometimes still feel the same way
when it comes to repos by well-known names in the communities.

------
britta
This is great. I want this information to be in a form easily accessible and
readable for any project maintainer who wants to learn about concrete ways to
improve their projects. So, question: what form should that be? A blog post
explaining the highlights, with a title with good keywords? A YouTube video
with explanations and anecdotes, like a talk without a conference? Where do
maintainers learn about this kind of thing (other than occasional news posts
on HN with advice), so that we can make this information show up there?

I volunteer for OpenHatch ([https://openhatch.org/](https://openhatch.org/)),
a non-profit open source project that aims to help newcomers contribute to
projects + help projects make themselves more welcoming. What do you think is
the most effective step OpenHatch could take for helping maintainers? It has
some efforts already, and I have some ideas, but I'm curious to hear more
ideas. (Also if you want to help, OpenHatch is already a loose collection of
people who care about this; come join us.)

~~~
vitovito
Open source project maintainers might also consider a lighter-weight
implementation, a CONTRIBUTING file, per Brad Fitzpatrick's CONTRIBUTING
project: [http://contributing.appspot.com](http://contributing.appspot.com)

------
kazinator
False alarm! This paper is not about barriers in actually working with open
source, but largely about what I would call _" barriers a newcomer faces in
their quest to be accepted as an esteemed contributor or maintainer, with
their name stamped the project, and their changes in the official trunk 'n
everything!"_.

If an OSS program is not doing something that you would like, you can get the
code and fix it. No waiting for anyone's response, no mentorship, no B.S.
Moreover, you can publish your patch somewhere without upstreaming it to the
original project.

I have recently done this with three programs: rsyslog, the Lurker mailing
list archiver, and a MIDI sequencer for Windows called Sekaiju. I made these
programs do what I want, and put my changes in public git repos hosted on my
server.

Speaking of Lurker: I developed a way to show HTML mailing list posts as
actual HTML in the web archive. The Lurker maintainer was vehemently against
this on security grounds (even though I implemented a HTML filter which
validates for a set of allowed tags and attributes.) The feature needs more
work: namely, image links do not work properly. You can see images as
attachments (existing feature), but the links within the HTML to the images
are broken: they are the original URL's which need to be re-written to point
to the archiver-generated URL's. This could be done in the "HTML cleaner",
which is an external program hosted here, not originating from Lurker:

[http://www.kylheku.com/cgit/hc/](http://www.kylheku.com/cgit/hc/)

My Lurker fork is hosted here:

[http://www.kylheku.com/cgit/lurker/](http://www.kylheku.com/cgit/lurker/)

------
vitovito
This reads like an academic version of my essay, "How to get designers (or
anyone) to work on your open source project," which is pretty exciting.

If you're a project leader that wants new people, whether devs or designers or
doc writers or anyone, [http://opensourcedesign.is/blogging_about/import-
designers/](http://opensourcedesign.is/blogging_about/import-designers/) is my
essay, and it provides concrete steps you can take, with real examples from a
technologically non-trivial open source project.

It looks like my essay hits all the points from this paper, which is nice to
see.

------
e15ctr0n
Many open source projects use IRC as a main communication channel. I've heard
that newcomers find IRC hard - they are used to Skype, Hangouts, chat apps,
etc. How is this barrier overcome?

~~~
bane
Abstract over the outdated IRC cruft, but use IRC as the communication medium.
Some ideas:

\- Process all user-input so that they can't run commands or do other
crazyness in the channel.

\- All commands and actions other than chatting are to be handled by the
client. This also allows for "IRC2" type commands that aren't part of the IRC
spec to be handled "in-band" in the channel, but not seen by any users.

\- Channels have a built in admin bot that handles client commands, sets
restrictions on channel content, manages mods, channel ownership, names etc.
This should be invisible to most users.

\- The client should enable end-to-end encryption. Maybe public-key so that
user identities can also be verified.

\- a user using a normal IRC client and logging into one of these "IRC2"
channels would basically just see a bunch of users communicating in encrypted
gibberish and not be able to participate

\- the client should let people post and view links to images, videos, etc.
and automatically embed them in the chat client. Embedded media should stay
collapsed until the user clicks it, but then they'll see a resized image or an
embedded youtube video, or a player around a soundcloud song or whatever.

\- people should be able to nominate awesome quotes to "archive" into a subset
of the logged channel.

\- channels should be listed on an entry page. Let's get rid of stupid sigils
like # and other nonsense. Just show the channel name.

\- people can establish private group channels (like a hangout) or 1-1
channels, access is controlled by the default channel bot.

\- video or voice chat would be handled outside of the IRC server, but setting
up the communications could be handled in-band.

Feel free to knock any of these down as bad ideas.

~~~
e15ctr0n
Is there any user-friendly IRC client out there?

~~~
bane
That's the problem. Most of the IRC clients I'm aware try to bury as much IRC
stuff as possible in the GUI rather than simplifying and abstracting the
experience away. I think there's probably a big opening here.

------
mazsa
[http://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=117618472281244817...](http://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=11761847228124481741)

------
ssivark
Talk about the barriers faced by people trying to get access to academic
literature![^1]

Anyways, here are (freely accessible) slides of a talk by the author(s) --
[http://www.slideshare.net/ifsteinm/oss-2014-systematic-
revie...](http://www.slideshare.net/ifsteinm/oss-2014-systematic-review-on-
barriers-faced-by-newcomers-to-oss)

[^1]: Google does make life _much_ easier.

EDIT: I guess the main link is downloadable now, but I still kinda prefer
slides.

~~~
dang
How is the main link downloadable?

~~~
_delirium
It is if you create an academia.edu account, but not otherwise.

This is a direct link hosted by the first author, from his publication page
[1]:
[http://www.igor.pro.br/publica/papers/OSS2014.pdf](http://www.igor.pro.br/publica/papers/OSS2014.pdf).
It's on a university server and publicly posted, so I think should be ok to
link to instead of the academia.edu link.

[1] [http://www.igor.pro.br/publica.php](http://www.igor.pro.br/publica.php)

~~~
dang
Thanks. We changed to that from
[http://www.academia.edu/6537077/Barriers_faced_by_newcomers_...](http://www.academia.edu/6537077/Barriers_faced_by_newcomers_to_open_source_projects_a_systematic_review).

------
rwmj
Is there some way to download it without requiring 8 different Javascript
sites to be enabled and registration? Like a direct link to the PDF.

Edit: News link has been fixed now to a more accessible resource, thanks
moderators!

------
elchief
The words "gender", "sex", "women", "female" don't appear in that doc...weird.

~~~
jakobsen
Why would it? The vast majority of people with whom I interact in OS projects
have no clue what my gender (or ethnicity for that matter) is.

