From Conversations to Action: Creating a healthy, diverse open source community.

E147 | Sat 15 Jul 6 p.m.–6:30 p.m.

Presented by

  • Anita Sarma

    Anita Sarma
    @asarma
    https://web.engr.oregonstate.edu/~sarmaa/

    Dr. Anita Sarma is a professor and Associate Head of Research in the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. She received her Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of California, Irvine and was a postdoctoral fellow at Carnegie Mellon University. Her research focuses on human factors in software development and how to design inclusive technology to help software developers. Her passion is in fostering DEI in Open Source. Her work crosscuts areas of SE, AI for SE, HCI, open source, and CSCW. She has co-authored more than 100 conference and journal articles, and has received numerous awards. She received the OSU Breaking Barriers Research award (2021) for her work in removing gender biases from software. She is a co-director of the GenderMag project. She is a recipient of the NSF CAREER award (2013) and Google Inclusion Research Award (2022).

  • Zixuan Steve Feng

    Zixuan Steve Feng
    https://zixuanfeng.github.io/zixuanfeng_page/

    My name is Zixuan (Steve) Feng. I am pursing Ph.D., advised by Anita Sarma in the Department of Electrical Engineering Computer Science and Statistics at Oregon State University (OSU). I work at the intersection of Software Engineering (SE), Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). I am particularly interested in developing an empirical understanding of the collaboration in OSS and the challenges that this socio-technical ecosystem faces in attracting and retaining contributors and designing interventions to improve the state of Diversity and Inclusion in OSS and increase contributor recruitment and retention.

Abstract

In the world of open source software (OSS) development, attracting and retaining motivated developers is key to a project's sustainability and long-term survival. Many of us recognize the lack of diversity in OSS projects and the barriers that individuals from underrepresented groups face, but what can we do to retain diverse contributors? In this talk, I will present two evidence-based dashboards to help attract and retain diverse contributors. The first dashboard provides a set of real-time insights to track community turnover and diversity, and focuses on gender and affiliation diversity. The second dashboard determines contributors’ survivability likelihood in the project. These dashboards can empower project leaders to assess the diverse state of their projects and take relevant action to promote diversity in their projects