Barcomb A, Stol KJ, Riehle D, Fitzgerald B (2019)
Publication Language: English
Publication Type: Conference contribution, Original article
Publication year: 2019
Publisher: ACM/IEEE
Conference Proceedings Title: International Conference on Software Engineering 2019
Event location: Montréal
Successful Free/Libre and Open Source Software
(FLOSS) projects incorporate both habitual and infrequent, or episodic, contributors. Using the concept of episodic volunteering
(EV) from the general volunteering literature, we derive a model
consisting of five key constructs that we hypothesize affect
episodic volunteers’ retention in FLOSS communities. To evaluate
the model we conducted a survey and received responses from
over 100 FLOSS episodic volunteers. We observe that three
of the constructs (social norms, satisfaction and community
commitment) are all positively associated with volunteers’ intention to remain, while the two other constructs (psychological
sense of community and contributor benefit motivations) are not.
Furthermore, exploratory clustering on unobserved heterogeneity
suggests that there are four distinct categories of volunteers:
satisfied, classic, social and obligated. Based on our findings, we
offer suggestions for projects to incorporate and manage episodic
volunteers, so as to better leverage this type of contributors and
potentially improve projects’ sustainability.
APA:
Barcomb, A., Stol, K.-J., Riehle, D., & Fitzgerald, B. (2019). Why Do Episodic Volunteers Stay in FLOSS Communities? In International Conference on Software Engineering 2019. Montréal: ACM/IEEE.
MLA:
Barcomb, Ann, et al. "Why Do Episodic Volunteers Stay in FLOSS Communities?" Proceedings of the International Conference on Software Engineering, Montréal ACM/IEEE, 2019.
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