Committer Assessment Practice in Blockchain Project: A Systematic Literature Review

As Blockchain projects gain popularity among developers, the number of patched codes rapidly increases. With such growth, it is difficult for the few committers to maintain it in a timely manner. Subsequently, the community is always in search of new committers. This highlights the imperative importance of committer assessment decisions towards the success of Blockchain. However, the practices come with risks whereby new committers may harm the project. For example, a new committer may initiate a hard fork that splits a project. Numerous systematic literature reviews have investigated developer turnover’s impact on open-source software (OSS) projects. These studies mainly focused on aspects such as community participation, engagement, and motivation. However, previous reviews often overlooked committer assessment practices, particularly in the context of Blockchain projects. Although Blockchain operates as OSS, its distinct attributes, such as decentralisation and cryptography, justify the need for a dedicated review. Therefore, the objectives of this review are to 1) identify committer assessment practices, 2) identify problems in committer assessment, 3) identify existing factors in committer assessment, and 4) suggest some possible research topics. These goals were achieved through a systematic review of literature published between 2010 and 2022. The findings suggest that previous assessment models are useful but mainly focus on technical factors. The results also indicate that studies focusing on behavioural tendencies, which influence human activities, have so far been neglected. Finally, the paper concludes by charting potential open research opportunities

Modeling the Effects of Diversity and Corporations on Participation Dynamics in FLOSS Ecosystems

A multitude of societal issues associated with the development of technology have emerged over the years including, but not limited to: insufficient personnel for maintenance; a lack of accessibility; the spread of harmful tools; and bias and discrimination against marginalized groups. I propose that a systems perspective is necessary to identify potential leverage points in technology production systems to influence them towards increased social good and evaluate their effectiveness for intervention. Toward this end, I conducted a mixed-methods study of a widely-adopted approach in tech production, free/libre and open source software (FLOSS) development. A survey was distributed to elicit responses from FLOSS project contributors to characterize their perceptions of diversity and corporate involvement as they relate to participation decisions and information gathering activities in online platforms. To complement this, an analysis of data from FLOSS projects on GitHub was completed to model participation dynamics. Survey results indicate that contributors attend to information that is used to infer group diversity and information about corporate decision making related to FLOSS systems. Furthermore, the influence of this information on participation decisions varies on the basis of economic needs and sociopolitical beliefs. Analyses of eighteen project ecosystems, with over 9,000 contributors, reveal that projects with no to some corporate involvement generally have broader contributor and user bases than those that are owned by a company. Taken together, these findings suggest that the internal practices of companies involved in FLOSS can be perceived as opaque and controlling which is detrimental to both the expansion of a project\u27s contributor base and for increasing diversity across FLOSS ecosystems. This research highlights the need to differentiate projects on the basis of corporate involvement and community ethos to design appropriate interventions. A set of recommendations and research propositions are offered to improve inclusivity, equity, and sustainability in tech development