womeninoss.com: Supporting women participation in OSS communities with an online platform
Resumo
Women are severely underrepresented in open-source software (OSS) communities, accounting for only 10% of overall contributors [20]. Unlike their male counterparts, women often face genderspecific barriers that diminish their participation in open source, including issues such as impostor syndrome, gender bias, and a lack of visible role models [20]. These challenges create a compounding effect that perpetuates their underrepresentation and limits their contributions within OSS projects, highlighting the need for interventions that can foster more inclusive and equitable environments. To support women to overcome these challenges and promote their participation in OSS, we propose the development of womeninoss.com: an online platform designed to educate, empower, and support women’s involvement in open-source communities. Designed to support both newcomers and maintainers in OSS, our web-based platform offers research-driven insights on gender inclusion in open source, along with a suite of practical tools to help individuals and communities increase and sustain women’s collaboration in OSS projects. In a preliminary evaluation of our platform, we invited 15 software developers to provide feedback on its significance, content relevance, and potential impact on fostering women’s participation in OSS. Our preliminary findings suggest that the platform was well-received, with participants highlighting its potential to serve as a valuable resource for both newcomers and community maintainers. Demo video: https://zenodo.org/records/15465699
Referências
Sogol Balali, Igor Steinmacher, Umayal Annamalai, Anita Sarma, and Marco Aurelio Gerosa. 2018. Newcomers’ Barriers... Is That All? An Analysis of Mentors’ and Newcomers’ Barriers in OSS Projects. Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) 27, 3-6 (2018), 679–714.
Edna Dias Canedo, Rodrigo Bonifácio, Márcio Vinicius Okimoto, Alexander Serebrenik, Gustavo Pinto, and Eduardo Monteiro. 2020. Work practices and perceptions from women core developers in oss communities. In Proceedings of the 14th ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement (ESEM). 1–11.
Gerardo Canfora, Massimiliano Di Penta, Stefano Giannantonio, Rocco Oliveto, and Sebastiano Panichella. 2013. YODA: Young and newcomer developer assistant. In 2013 35th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE). IEEE, 1331–1334.
Arifa I Champa, Md Fazle Rabbi, Minhaz F Zibran, and Md Rakibul Islam. 2023. Insights into female contributions in open-source projects. In 2023 IEEE/ACM 20th International Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR). IEEE, 357–361.
Luis Felipe Dias, Igor Steinmacher, and Gustavo Pinto. 2018. Who drives companyowned OSS projects: internal or external members? Journal of the Brazilian Computer Society 24, 1 (2018), 16.
Hana Frluckaj, Laura Dabbish, David Gray Widder, Huilian Sophie Qiu, and James D Herbsleb. 2022. Gender and participation in open source software development. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction 6, CSCW2 (2022), 1–31.
Anna May, Johannes Wachs, and Anikó Hannák. 2019. Gender differences in participation and reward on Stack Overflow. Empirical Software Engineering 24 (2019), 1997–2019.
Gustavo Pinto, Igor Steinmacher, Luiz Felipe Dias, and Marco Gerosa. 2018. On the challenges of open-sourcing proprietary software projects. Empirical Software Engineering 23 (2018), 3221–3247.
A. Quade. 2003. Development and validation of a computer science self-efficacy scale for CS0 courses and the group analysis of CS0 student self-efficacy. In Proceedings ITCC 2003. International Conference on Information Technology: Coding and Computing. 60–64. DOI: 10.1109/ITCC.2003.1197500
Vandana Singh and Brice Bongiovanni. 2021. Motivated and capable but no space for error. The International journal of information, diversity, & inclusion 5, 3 (2021), 98–126.
Diomidis Spinellis and Clemens Szyperski. 2004. How is open source affecting software development? IEEE software 21, 1 (2004), 28.
Igor Steinmacher, Tayana Conte, Marco Aurélio Gerosa, and David Redmiles. 2015. Social barriers faced by newcomers placing their first contribution in open source software projects. In Proceedings of the 18th ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work & social computing. 1379–1392.
Igor Steinmacher, Tayana Uchoa Conte, Christoph Treude, and Marco Aurélio Gerosa. 2016. Overcoming open source project entry barriers with a portal for newcomers. In Proceedings of the 38th International Conference on Software Engineering. 273–284.
Igor Steinmacher, Tayana Uchoa Conte, Christoph Treude, and Marco Aurélio Gerosa. 2016. Overcoming open source project entry barriers with a portal for newcomers. In Proceedings of the 38th International Conference on Software Engineering. 273–284.
Josh Terrell, Andrew Kofink, Justin Middleton, Clarissa Rainear, Emerson R Murphy-Hill, and Chris Parnin. 2016. Gender bias in open source: Pull request acceptance of women versus men. PeerJ Prepr. 4 (2016), e1733.
Parastou Tourani, Bram Adams, and Alexander Serebrenik. 2017. Code of conduct in open source projects. In 2017 IEEE 24th International Conference on Software Analysis, Evolution and Reengineering (SANER). 24–33. DOI: 10.1109/SANER.2017.7884606
Bianca Trinkenreich. 2022. Understanding and supporting women’s participation in open source software. Ph.D. Dissertation. Northern Arizona University.
Bianca Trinkenreich, Marco Aurelio Gerosa, and Igor Steinmacher. 2022. Women in open source: We need to talk about it. Computer 55, 12 (2022), 145–149.
Bianca Trinkenreich, Igor Wiese, Anita Sarma, Marco Gerosa, and Igor Steinmacher. 2022. Women’s participation in open source software: A survey of the literature. ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology (TOSEM) 31, 4 (2022), 1–37.
Bogdan Vasilescu, Andrea Capiluppi, and Alexander Serebrenik. 2014. Gender, representation and online participation: A quantitative study. Interacting with Computers 26, 5 (2014), 488–511.
Bogdan Vasilescu, Daryl Posnett, Baishakhi Ray, Mark GJ van den Brand, Alexander Serebrenik, Premkumar Devanbu, and Vladimir Filkov. 2015. Gender and tenure diversity in GitHub teams. In Proceedings of the 33rd annual ACM conference on human factors in computing systems. 3789–3798.
Minghui Zhou and Audris Mockus. 2012. What make long term contributors: Willingness and opportunity in OSS community. In 2012 34th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE). IEEE, 518–528.
