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[OH-Publicity] This week's post: Discussing Kevin Carillo's newcomer experience survey

Kevin Carillo Kevin.Carillo at vuw.ac.nz
Thu Nov 8 19:06:09 UTC 2012


Hi everyone. 
I am copying here a blog post I have written to promote the survey within the Debian community. It shall give some good idea.
Thanks for your help.

Kevin

Newcomer experience in Debian and other FOSS communities - Survey
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My name is Kevin Carillo. I am a PhD student currently living in Wellington (New Zealand) and I am doing some research on Free/Open Source Software communities. 

If you have joined the Debian community after January 2010 (within approximately the last 3 years), I would like to kindly request your help. I am interested in hearing from people who are either technical or non-technical contributors, and who have had either positive or negative newcomer experiences.

The purpose of the research is to work out how newcomers to a FOSS community become valued sustainable contributors. 
The survey can be found at:
https://limesurvey.sim.vuw.ac.nz/index.php?sid=65151&lang=en 

Inspiration from Debian New Member
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Debian is a successful community that keeps attracting new contributors and that relies on a very unique way to handle the integration of new contributors: the New Member process.    

The idea behind the NM process is that it is some sort of filtering procedure allowing to only retain the individuals who have the potential to become valued sustainable contributors in Debian. Within Debian, there is a lot of enthusiasm and pride around the NM process as it seems to be functioning pretty well but the question is: IS this really enough to ensure that Debian remains a healthy and growing community? How does it compare to the way newcomers are integrated in other large projects such as KDE, Gnome or in other non-Linux related communities such as Mozilla? 
I have to admit that the Debian NM process has been among the main sources of inspiration that made me embark in this research project. I have kept being puzzled when talking to people who had gone through the process.  Even though it is a very tedious and formal procedure that requires a lot of effort (and sometimes frustration), people come out of it with a real passion for the project and love for its community.
When reflecting on the reasons why the NM process succeeds, I sometimes argue that it is some instance of ritualized socialization. In other words, barriers and initiation rituals that cause newcomers to suffer to some extent, generate members with higher commitment and sense of identification towards the Debian community. 

A healthy community needs project citizens
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The rationale behind this research project is the following. Suppose a community manages to attract 20 new members every month and suppose a large number of them do not comply to the code of conduct, commit changes without considering the people or modules/components being affected by the commits, do not attend or contribute to any of the community events, do not assist any other members when they seek for help, do not treat other members with respect ... It will not take a lot of time until the health of the community will be affected and the future of the project seriously jeopardized. 
The main assumption that motivated this project is that attracting new members has become crucial for a large majority of FOSS communities but this is not a sufficient condition to ensure the success and prosperity of a project.
So, yes ... it is important to attract newcomers but a community needs to make sure that a certain proportion of these newcomers become 'good' contributors from the community perspective. 'Good' in the sense that they shall contribute to the well-being and growth of the community. 'Good' as good community citizens.

What do newcomers have to say about their experience?
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Keeping all that in mind, FOSS projects have thus to do a good job at 'socializing' their newcomers and turning them into contributors. Doing a good job here means that FOSS projects shall ensure that they help generate those citizenship behaviors from newcomers by designing appropriate newcomer programmes and procedures.
FOSS communities rely on a wide array of initiatives to facilitate the integration of newcomers but it seems like the other side of the coin is less understood: What do newcomers really experience? And how does this influence their contributions and actions within a project?
How is this study going to help Debian?
The data will help gain insights about the experience of newcomers within the Debian community. In addition, it will allow to understand how to design effective newcomer initiatives to ensure that Debian will remain a successful and healthy community. 
The dataset will be released under a share-alike ODbL license so that Debian contributors can extract as much value as possible from the data. 
Since this survey also involves other large FOSS projects such as Mozilla, KDE, Gnome, Ubuntu, Gentoo, OpenSUSE, and NetBSD, it will also be possible to compare practices across projects in order to identify what works from what does not work when facilitating the integration of newcomers. 

About the survey
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This survey is anonymous, and no information that would identify you is being collected. I expect the survey to take around 20 minutes of your time.

The survey is available at: 
https://limesurvey.sim.vuw.ac.nz/index.php?sid=65151&lang=en 
It will be available until Tuesday, 20 November, 2012. 

If you know members of the Debian community who you think would be interested in completing it, please do not hesitate to let them know about this research.
I will post news about my progress with this research, and the results on my blog: http://kevincarillo.org. Don't hesitate to contact me at kevin.carillo at vuw.ac.nz.

-----Original Message-----
From: Asheesh Laroia [mailto:asheesh at asheesh.org] 
Sent: Thursday, 8 November 2012 1:29 p.m.
To: publicity at lists.openhatch.org
Cc: Kevin Carillo
Subject: This week's post: Discussing Kevin Carillo's newcomer experience survey

Hello publicity peeps,

This week, I want to write about Kevin Carillo's academic and also 
practical survey on "Newcomer experience and contributor behavior in FOSS 
communities."

I've helped Kevin out by reviewing his survey and pointing him in the 
direction of some hopefully friendly contacts at other projects.

For context, the landing page for the survey is here: 
http://kevincarillo.org/survey-invitation/

For OH-Publicity's side, I hope to get the post written in the next 1-2 
days!

Also, Kevin might email this list with some other supporting information 
to help me write the post.

-- Asheesh.




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