Encouraging Women Participation in Free and Open Source Software Organizations: The GNOME OPW Initiative

Even though the global demand for computing talent is surging, women’s representation in the computing profession has steadily declined. This phenomenon is not new and is present worldwide, not being associated with a particular country or culture. The reason of why women tend to avoid computing careers does not have a clear answer yet and is being researched by several organizations, institutions and companies. The GNOME Outreach Program for Women (OPW) internships has been inspired by this fact. Focused on the context of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) organizations, the GNOME’s OPW is performing a great effort for the integration of women in this particular area of CS. This paper analyzes several issues on how can women be encouraged to participate in FOSS organizations, based on the experiences of a former GNOME OPW intern. In addition we discuss the role of different stakeholders (organizations, universities) in improving women participation in FOSS organizations in Argentina.Sociedad Argentina de Informática e Investigación Operativ

Encouraging Women Participation in Free and Open Source Software Organizations: The GNOME OPW Initiative

Even though the global demand for computing talent is surging, women’s representation in the computing profession has steadily declined. This phenomenon is not new and is present worldwide, not being associated with a particular country or culture. The reason of why women tend to avoid computing careers does not have a clear answer yet and is being researched by several organizations, institutions and companies. The GNOME Outreach Program for Women (OPW) internships has been inspired by this fact. Focused on the context of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) organizations, the GNOME’s OPW is performing a great effort for the integration of women in this particular area of CS. This paper analyzes several issues on how can women be encouraged to participate in FOSS organizations, based on the experiences of a former GNOME OPW intern. In addition we discuss the role of different stakeholders (organizations, universities) in improving women participation in FOSS organizations in Argentina.Sociedad Argentina de Informática e Investigación Operativ

Encouraging Women Participation in Free and Open Source Software Organizations: The GNOME OPW Initiative

Even though the global demand for computing talent is surging, women’s representation in the computing profession has steadily declined. This phenomenon is not new and is present worldwide, not being associated with a particular country or culture. The reason of why women tend to avoid computing careers does not have a clear answer yet and is being researched by several organizations, institutions and companies. The GNOME Outreach Program for Women (OPW) internships has been inspired by this fact. Focused on the context of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) organizations, the GNOME’s OPW is performing a great effort for the integration of women in this particular area of CS. This paper analyzes several issues on how can women be encouraged to participate in FOSS organizations, based on the experiences of a former GNOME OPW intern. In addition we discuss the role of different stakeholders (organizations, universities) in improving women participation in FOSS organizations in Argentina.Sociedad Argentina de Informática e Investigación Operativ

Methods of Disambiguating and De-anonymizing Authorship in Large Scale Operational Data

Operational data from software development, social networks and other domains are often contaminated with incorrect or missing values. Examples include misspelled or changed names, multiple emails belonging to the same person and user profiles that vary in different systems. Such digital traces are extensively used in research and practice to study collaborating communities of various kinds. To achieve a realistic representation of the networks that represent these communities, accurate identities are essential. In this work, we aim to identify, model, and correct identity errors in data from open-source software repositories, which include more than 23M developer IDs and nearly 1B Git commits (developer activity records). Our investigation into the nature and prevalence of identity errors in software activity data reveals that they are different and occur at much higher rates than other domains. Existing techniques relying on string comparisons can only disambiguate Synonyms, but not Homonyms, which are common in software activity traces. Therefore, we introduce measures of behavioral fingerprinting to improve the accuracy of Synonym resolution, and to disambiguate Homonyms. Fingerprints are constructed from the traces of developers’ activities, such as, the style of writing in commit messages, the patterns in files modified and projects participated in by developers, and the patterns related to the timing of the developers’ activity. Furthermore, to address the lack of training data necessary for the supervised learning approaches that are used in disambiguation, we design a specific active learning procedure that minimizes the manual effort necessary to create training data in the domain of developer identity matching. We extensively evaluate the proposed approach, using over 16,000 OpenStack developers in 1200 projects, against commercial and most recent research approaches, and further on recent research on a much larger sample of over 2,000,000 IDs. Results demonstrate that our method is significantly better than both the recent research and commercial methods. We also conduct experiments to demonstrate that such erroneous data have significant impact on developer networks. We hope that the proposed approach will expedite research progress in the domain of software engineering, especially in applications for which graphs of social networks are critical

Coopetition in an open-source way : lessons from mobile and cloud computing infrastructures

An increasing amount of technology is no longer developed in-house. Instead, we are in a new age where technology is developed by a networked community of individuals and organizations, who base their relations to each other on mutual interest. Advances arising from research in platforms, ecosystems, and infrastructures can provide valuable knowledge for better understanding and explaining technology development among a network of firms. More surprisingly, recent research suggests that technology can be jointly developed by rival competing firms in an open-source way. For instance, it is known that the mobile device makers Apple and Samsung continued collaborating in open-source projects while running expensive patent wars in the courts. On top of multidisciplinary theory in open-source software, cooperation among competitors (aka coopetition) and digital infrastructures, I (and my coauthors) explored how rival firms cooperate in the joint development of open-source infrastructures. While assimilating a wide variety of paradigms and analytical approaches, this doctoral research combined the qualitative analysis of naturally occurring data (QA) with the mining of software repositories (MSR) and social network analysis (SNA) within a set of case studies. By turning to the mobile and cloud computing industries in general, and the WebKit and OpenStack opensource infrastructures in particular, we found out that qualitative ethnographic materials, combined with social network visualizations, provide a rich medium that enables a better understanding of competitive and cooperative issues that are simultaneously present and interconnected in open-source infrastructures. Our research contributes back to managerial literature in coopetition strategy, but more importantly to Information Systems by addressing both cooperation and competition within the development of high-networked open-source infrastructures.Yhä suurempaa osaa teknologiasta ei enää kehitetä organisaatioiden omasta toimesta. Sen sijaan, olemme uudella aikakaudella jossa teknologiaa kehitetään verkostoituneessa yksilöiden ja organisaatioiden yhteisössä, missä toimitaan perustuen yhteiseen tavoitteeseen. Alustojen, ekosysteemien ja infrastruktuurien tutkimuksen tulokset voivat tuottaa arvokasta tietämystä teknologian kehittämisestä yritysten verkostossa. Erityisesti tuore tutkimustieto osoittaa että kilpailevat yritykset voivat yhdessä kehittää teknologiaa avoimeen lähdekoodiin perustuvilla käytännöillä. Esimerkiksi tiedetään että mobiililaitteiden valmistajat Apple ja Samsung tekivät yhteistyötä avoimen lähdekoodin projekteissa ja kävivät samaan aikaan kalliita patenttitaistoja eri oikeusfoorumeissa. Perustuen monitieteiseen teoriaan avoimen lähdekoodin ohjelmistoista, yhteistyöstä kilpailijoiden kesken (coopetition) sekä digitaalisista infrastruktuureista, minä (ja kanssakirjoittajani) tutkimme miten kilpailevat yritykset tekevät yhteistyötä avoimen lähdekoodin infrastruktuurien kehityksessä. Sulauttaessaan runsaan joukon paradigmoja ja analyyttisiä lähestymistapoja case-joukon puitteissa, tämä väitöskirjatutkimus yhdisti luonnollisesti esiintyvän datan kvantitatiivisen analyysin ohjelmapakettivarastojen louhintaan ja sosiaalisten verkostojen analyysiin. Tutkiessamme mobiili- ja pilvipalveluiden teollisuudenaloja yleisesti, ja WebKit ja OpenStack avoimen lähdekoodin infrastruktuureja erityisesti, havaitsimme että kvalitatiiviset etnografiset materiaalit yhdistettyinä sosiaalisten verkostojen visualisointiin tuottavat rikkaan aineiston joka mahdollistaa avoimen lähdekoodin infrastruktuuriin samanaikaisesti liittyvien kilpailullisten ja yhteistyökuvioiden hyvän ymmärtämisen. Tutkimuksemme antaa oman panoksensa johdon kirjallisuuteen coopetition strategy -alueella, mutta sitäkin enemmän tietojärjestelmätieteeseen, läpikäymällä sekä yhteistyötä että kilpailua tiiviisti verkostoituneessa avoimen lähdekoodin infrastruktuurien kehitystoiminnassaUma crescente quantidade de tecnologia não é desenvolvida internamente por uma só organização. Em vez disso, estamos em uma nova era em que a tecnologia é desenvolvida por uma comunidade de indivíduos e organizações que baseiam suas relações umas com as outras numa rede de interesse mútuo. Os avanços teórico decorrentes da pesquisa em plataformas computacionais, ecossistemas e infraestruturas digitais fornecem conhecimentos valiosos para uma melhor compreensão e explicação do desenvolvimento tecnológico por uma rede de multiplas empresas. Mais surpreendentemente, pesquisas recentes sugerem que tecnologia pode ser desenvolvida conjuntamente por empresas rivais concorrentes e de uma forma aberta (em código aberto). Por exemplo, sabe-se que os fabricantes de dispositivos móveis Apple e Samsung continuam a colaborar em projetos de código aberto ao mesmo tempo que se confrontam em caras guerras de patentes nos tribunais. Baseados no conhecimento científico de software de código aberto, de cooperação entre concorrentes (também conhecida como coopetição) e de infraestruturas digitais, eu e os meus co-autores exploramos como empresas concorrentes cooperam no desenvolvimento conjunto de infraestruturas de código aberto. Ao utilizar uma variedade de paradigmas e abordagens analíticas, esta pesquisa de doutoramento combinou a análise qualitativa de dados de ocorrência natural (QA) com a análise de repositórios de softwares (MSR) e a análise de redes sociais (SNA) dentro de um conjunto de estudos de casos. Ao investigar as industrias de technologias móveis e de computação em nuvem em geral, e as infraestruturas em código aberto WebKit e OpenStack, em particular, descobrimos que o material etnográfico qualitativo, combinado com visualizações de redes sociais, fornece um meio rico que permite uma melhor compreensão das problemas competitivos e cooperativos que estão simultaneamente presentes e interligados em infraestruturas de código aberto. A nossa pesquisa contribui para a literatura em gestão estratégica e coompetição, mas mais importante para literatura em Sistemas de Informação, abordando a cooperação e concorrência no desenvolvimento de infraestruturas de código aberto por uma rede the indivíduos e organizações em interesse mútuo

Ethics in the mining of software repositories

Research in Mining Software Repositories (MSR) is research involving human subjects, as the repositories usually contain data about developers’ and users’ interactions with the repositories and with each other. The ethics issues raised by such research therefore need to be considered before beginning. This paper presents a discussion of ethics issues that can arise in MSR research, using the mining challenges from the years 2006 to 2021 as a case study to identify the kinds of data used. On the basis of contemporary research ethics frameworks we discuss ethics challenges that may be encountered in creating and using repositories and associated datasets. We also report some results from a small community survey of approaches to ethics in MSR research. In addition, we present four case studies illustrating typical ethics issues one encounters in projects and how ethics considerations can shape projects before they commence. Based on our experience, we present some guidelines and practices that can help in considering potential ethics issues and reducing risks

An Introduction to Software Ecosystems

This chapter defines and presents different kinds of software ecosystems. The focus is on the development, tooling and analytics aspects of software ecosystems, i.e., communities of software developers and the interconnected software components (e.g., projects, libraries, packages, repositories, plug-ins, apps) they are developing and maintaining. The technical and social dependencies between these developers and software components form a socio-technical dependency network, and the dynamics of this network change over time. We classify and provide several examples of such ecosystems. The chapter also introduces and clarifies the relevant terms needed to understand and analyse these ecosystems, as well as the techniques and research methods that can be used to analyse different aspects of these ecosystems.Comment: Preprint of chapter "An Introduction to Software Ecosystems" by Tom Mens and Coen De Roover, published in the book "Software Ecosystems: Tooling and Analytics" (eds. T. Mens, C. De Roover, A. Cleve), 2023, ISBN 978-3-031-36059-6, reproduced with permission of Springer. The final authenticated version of the book and this chapter is available online at: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36060-