One-Time Contributors to FLOSS: Surveys and Data Analysis

Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) projects rely on a steady influx of newcomer volunteer developers to survive. As these projects, unlike traditional software projects, often do not pay their contributors to work on them, volunteers must be obtained instead. Once obtained, a volunteer goes through a lengthy process in order to join the project, including obtaining sufficient knowledge of the codebase and learning the rules of the community. However, some developers drop out after they make a single commit to the code database. These developers are knowledgeable enough to commit code and make it through the onboarding process, but leave the project rather than join, therefore depriving the project of potential talent. We propose to understand these One-Time code Contributors (OTCs) through surveys and through data-mining the projects? software repositories: if they are a unique demographic, why they only commit once, if anything can be done to assist them. Once they are determined as a separate demographic, the study pivots to examine other factors that might affect OTCs, including such factors as project governance and project architecture.