Abstract
With the growth of free and open source software (FOSS) and the adoption of FOSS solutions in business and everyday life, it is important that projects serve their growingly diverse user base. The sustainability of FOSS projects relies on a constant influx of new contributors. Several large demographic surveys found that FOSS communities are very homogenous, dominated by young men, similar to the bias existing in the rest of the IT workforce. Building on previous research, we examine mailing list subscriptions and posting statistics of female FOSS participants. New participants often experience their first interaction on a FOSS project’s mailing list. We explored six FOSS projects – Buildroot, Busybox, Jaws, Parrot, uClibc, and Yum. We found a declining rate of female participation from the 8.27% of subscribers, to 6.63% of posters, and finally the often reported code contributor rate of 1.5%. We found a disproportionate attrition rate among women along every step of the FOSS joining process.
Chapter PDF
Similar content being viewed by others
References
About Us. The Humanitarian FOSS Project, http://www.hfoss.org/index.php/about-us
About OSUOSL. OSUOSL, http://osuosl.org/about-osuosl
Andersen, E.: BusyBox, http://busybox.net
Andersen, E.: UClibc, http://uclibc.org
Bitzer, J., Schrettl, W., Schroder, P.: Intrinsic Motivation in Open Source Software Development. Journal of Comparative Economics 35(1), 160–169 (2007)
Buildroot, http://buildroot.uclibc.org/
David, P., Waterman, A., Arora, S.: The Free/Libre/Open Source Software Survey for 2003. Stanford University (2003), http://www.stanford.edu/group/floss-us/
Fisher, A., Margolis, J.: Unlocking the Clubhouse: the Carnegie Mellon Experience. In: Proc. SIGCSE Bulletin, vol. 34, pp. 79–83 (2002)
Ghosh, R.A., Glott, R., Krieger, B., Robles, G.: Free/Libre and Open Source Software: Survey and Study, Part 4: Survey of Developers (June 2002), www.flossproject.org/report/
Gutwin, C., Penner, R., Schneider, K.: Group Awareness in Distributed Software Development. In: Proc. CSCS 2004, pp. 72–88. ACM Press (2004)
Jensen, C., King, S., Kuechler, V.: Joining Free/Open Source Software Communities: An Analysis of Newbies’ First Interactions on Project Mailing Lists. In: Proc. of HICSS 2011, pp. 1–10 (2011)
Katz, J.: Luring the Lurkers (1998), http://news.slashdot.org/story/98/12/28/1745252/Luring-the-Lurkers
Krogh, G., Spaeth, S., Lakhani, K.: Community, joining, and specialization in open source software innovation: a case study. Research Policy 32(7), 1217–1241 (2003)
Lakhani, K.R., Wolf, R.G.: The Boston Consulting Group Hacker Survey (2002), ftp3.au.freebsd.org/pub/linux.conf.au/2003/papers/Hemos/Hemos.pdf
Lampe, C., Johnston, E.: Follow the (Slash) dot: Effects of Feedback on New Members in an Online Community. In: Proc. of the 2005 Int. Conf. on Supporting Group Work, pp. 11–20 (2005)
Mason, B.: Issues in virtual ethnography. In: Proc. of Ethnographic Studies in Real and Virtual Environments: Inhabited Information Spaces and Connected Communities, pp. 61–69 (1999)
MBOX Documentation. Qmail Mirror Selection (1998), http://www.qmail.org/man/man5/mbox.html
Nafus, D., Leach, J., Krieger, B.: Deliverable D16: Gender: Integrated Report of Findings. Free/Libre/Open Source Software: Policy Support, http://www.flosspols.org/
U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics. The Condition of Education 2011. NCES, Table A-26-2 (2011), http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=72
About: Fact Sheet. National Center for Women and Information Technology, http://www.ncwit.org/about.factsheet.html
Nonnecke, B., Preece, J.: Lurker Demographics: Counting the Silent. In: CHI 2000, pp. 73–80. ACM Press (2000)
Raymond, E.S.: The Cathedral & the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary. O’Reilly, Beijing (1999)
Robert, K.: Standing out in a Crowd. Keynote Presentation. In: OSCON 2002, Dreamwidth (2002), http://www.oscon.com/oscon2009/public/schedule/detail/10173
Robles, G., Scheider, H., Tretkowski, I., Webers, N.: Who Is Doing It? A research on Libre Software developers (2001), http://widi.berlios.de/paper/study.html
Soroka, V., Jacovi, M., Ur, S.: We can see you: a study of the community’s invisible people through ReachOut. In: Huysman, M., Wenger, E., Wulf, V. (eds.) Proc. of Int. Conf. on Communities and Technologies, pp. 65–79. Kluwer Academic Publishers (2003)
Users & Documentation. Parrot VM. Web (August 21, 2011), http://parrot.org/dev/docs/user
Wheeler, D.: Why Open Source Software/Free Software (OSS/FS, FOSS, or FLOSS)? Look at the Numbers! (April 16, 2007), http://www.dwheeler.com/oss_fs_why.html
Women, Minorities, and Persons with Disabilities in Science and Engineering. U.S. National Science Foundation (2011), http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/wmpd/
Ye, Y., Kishida, K.: Toward an Understanding of the Motivation Open Source Software Developers. In: Proc. ICSE 2003, pp. 419–429 (2003)
Yum Package Manager, http://yum.baseurl.org/
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2012 IFIP International Federation for Information Processing
About this paper
Cite this paper
Kuechler, V., Gilbertson, C., Jensen, C. (2012). Gender Differences in Early Free and Open Source Software Joining Process. In: Hammouda, I., Lundell, B., Mikkonen, T., Scacchi, W. (eds) Open Source Systems: Long-Term Sustainability. OSS 2012. IFIP Advances in Information and Communication Technology, vol 378. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-33442-9_6
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-33442-9_6
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-33441-2
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-33442-9
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)