What make long term contributors: willingness and opportunity in OSS community

• Authors: Minghui Zhou;Audris Mockus
• Venue: Proceedings of the 34th International Conference on Software Engineering
• Year: 2012

To survive and succeed, software projects need to attract and retain contributors. We model the individual's chances to become a valuable contributor through their capacity, willingness, and the opportunity to contribute at the time of joining. Using issue tracking data of Mozilla and Gnome, we find that the probability for a new joiner to become a Long Term Contributor (LTC) is associated with her willingness and environment. Specifically, during their first month, future LTCs tend to be more active and show more community-oriented attitude than other joiners. Joiners who start by commenting on instead of reporting an issue or ones who succeed to get at least one reported issue to be fixed, more than double their odds of becoming an LTC. The macro-climate with high project relative sociality and the micro-climate with a large, productive, and clustered peer group increase the odds. On the contrary, the macro-climate with high project popularity and the micro-climate with low attention from peers reduce the odds. This implies that the interaction between individual's attitude and project's climate are associated with the odds that an individual would become a valuable contributor or disengage from the project. Our findings may provide a basis for empirical approaches to design a better community architecture and to improve the experience of contributors.