Congratulations to UMass faculty Charlie Schweik and Brenda Bushouse and UMass Postdoc Curtis Atkisson on being awarded a roughly $2M grant renewal from the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Growing Convergence Research program for their project, “Jumpstarting Successful Open-Source Software Projects with Evidence-based Rules and Structures.” The Growing Convergence Research program Is one of NSF’s 10 Big Ideas, recognizing the grand challenges found in today’s world will not be solved by single disciplines and requires “the merging of ideas, approaches and technologies from widely diverse fields of knowledge to stimulate innovation and discovery.”
This merging of disciplines is evident with the team structure of this project, which combines individuals from both UMass and the University of California (UC) Davis. Schweik is the Associate Director of PIT@UMass and Professor of Environmental Conservation and Public Policy, and a social scientist who studies collective action in “commons” settings. Bushouse is the Associate Professor of Public Policy in the UMass School of Public Policy and a social scientist with expertise in nonprofit organizations. Atkisson is an Anthropologist and Computational Social Scientist at UMass. The UC Davis team is led by Vladimir Filkov, a distinguished computer and data scientist, and Seth Frey, a cognitive and computational social scientist faculty member in UC Davis’ Department of Communications. Numerous doctoral and undergraduate students from a variety of departments in both universities also support their work.
This project impacts the public interest by discerning the socio-technical structural and governance conditions under which internet-based open-source software (OSS) projects are most—and least—likely to be successfully developed and maintained sustainably. The project provides actionable knowledge to OSS developers and to the nonprofit organizations that facilitate OSS development through incubator programs.
According to Schweik, “Open-source software is a multi-billion-dollar industry. Over 80% of businesses, including all major tech companies, rely on OSS, and most people use it in their day-to-day digital lives—browsing the web, editing documents, banking, hosting websites—often without realizing it. On campus we rely on Moodle, an OSS system, for our course management system. Our world relies on software to operate and, if you open the hood, you will find OSS infrastructure.”
“While this popularity attracts many programmers to create open-source projects, more than 90% of OSS projects are eventually abandoned, especially smaller and start-up phase projects,” he continued. The central research question we are working to answer is what leads some OSS projects toward ongoing sustainability while many others become abandoned. We are particularly interested in understanding the role nonprofit organizations like the Apache Software Foundation and others like it, play in incubating and mentoring OSS projects toward longer-term collaborative success.”