Clearing the Trail: Motivations for Maintenance Work in Open Source

kaestner@cs.cmu.edu (K. Wilson)
Fri, 9 Feb 2024 16:58:37 GMT

Katrina Wilson. Clearing the Trail: Motivations for Maintenance Work in Open Source. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Systems, Programming, Languages, and Applications: Software for Humanity (Companion) (SPLASH-SRC), pages 34--36, New York, NY: ACM Press, 2023. SPLASH student research competition.

Introducing new maintainers to established projects is critical to the long-term sustainability of open-source projects. Yet, we have little understanding of what motivates developers to join and maintain already established projects. Previous research on volunteering motivations emphasizes that individuals are motivated by a unique set of factors to volunteer in a specific area, suggesting that the motivations behind open-source contributions also depend on the nature of the work. We aim to determine correlations between types of open-source contributions and their specific motivators through surveys of open-source contributors.