Patching It Up, Pulling It Forward

Abstract

An important reason for making any software open source is to encourage code and other community contributions, resulting in more diverse developer communities coalescing around valuable software efforts. We believe the full picture of open developer communities is underappreciated by scientific and cyberinfrastructure open source software efforts. Free and open source licensing is popular in scientific and cyberinfrastructure software, and Web-based tools for source code management (such as GitHub and Bitbucket) are in common use, but community building efforts and associated governance models that foster these communities need improvement. We propose here a simple mechanism to address this problem: developers should be given incentives to submit patches and to make other measurable contributions to code bases that they use but are not otherwise connected to, and projects should be given incentives to accept these outside contributions. As an example implementation, we outline a contest system with small monetary rewards for individuals and recognition for both individuals and projects. The goal is to change the mindset of scientific and cyberinfrastructure developers, converting them from passive downstream users to active contributors. We hypothesize that this easily measurable concrete action will contribute to the sustainability of many projects and also create a more flexible scientific workforce. Building this effort on currently available, federally funded software will establish a foundation of public data that can be used to verify our hypothesis. More broadly, the effort will demonstrate the benefits for scientific and cyberinfrastructure projects that adopt workable governance models that are already well established in the broader open source software ecosystem.

Keywords

• cyberinfrastructure
• open source software
• software governance