COOPERATIVE SIGNALING BEHAVIOR: SIGNALS FOR OPEN SOURCE PROJECT HEALTH

The core contribution is a critique of signaling theory from investigating cooperative signaling behavior in the context of organizational engagement with open source projects. Open source projects display signals of project health which are used by organizations. Projects and organizations engage in cooperative signaling behavior when they work together to create signals. Signaling theory is critiqued in the cooperative context of organizational engagements with open source projects by describing how cooperative signaling behavior occurs in three processes: identifying, evaluating, and filtering new signals. The contribution is informed through engaged field research and interviews, which are presented as a thick description of the CHAOSS Diversity & Inclusion Working Group and of how its community members create D&I signals. A contribution to literature on open source is a description of how signals for open source project health are created