一句话：基于 GitHub 大规模数据揭示开源社区行为准则的演化模式及其对社区参与的影响。
开源社区常因毒性行为与歧视产生冲突并威胁项目可持续性，许多社区因此采纳行为准则（Code of Conduct, CoC）规范成员行为。已有研究关注 CoC 的采纳动机与内容更新，却不清楚采纳后各社区如何长期使用与维护 CoC，以及采纳对社区的影响。本文从 GitHub 构建大规模 CoC 及其变更历史数据集，定量刻画 CoC 内容演化与跨社区变更模式，并检验 CoC 采纳对社区参与度的影响。结果显示：有 CoC 的社区在短期和长期均吸引更多新贡献者，但采纳会在短期内加剧现有贡献者流失，对长期流失影响有限。研究为 CoC 维护提供指导，并给出统计显著的影响证据。
While open source software (OSS) communities thrive on collaboration, conflicts such as toxic behavior and discrimination can surface, threatening project sustainability. To address these concerns, many communities have adopted a Code of Conduct (CoC) as a mechanism for governing and moderating members’ behavior. Prior research has explored the motivations behind CoC adoption and their content updates, but it remains unclear how different communities are using and maintaining CoCs over time after initial adoption and how adoption impacts communities. To bridge these gaps, in our study, we compile a large-scale dataset of CoCs along with their change histories from GitHub to quantitatively (1) understand the evolution of CoC content and identify change patterns across different communities, and (2) investigate the potential impact of CoC adoption on community engagement. Our results show that OSS communities with a CoC attract more new contributors in both the short- and long-term. However, CoC adoption also leads to a short-term increase in disengagement among existing contributors, with very limited effects on long-term disengagement. The insights from this study can provide guidance for maintaining CoCs and offer statistically significant evidence of their impact.
@inproceedings{paperbot11660,
title = {Beyond Adoption: Examining the Evolution and Impact of Code of Conduct on Open Source Communities},
author = {Jiayi Sun and Hongbo Fang and Junming Zhang and Jiakai Shi and Ruitao Lai and Anita Ihuman and Richard Littauer and Shurui Zhou},
booktitle = {ICSE},
year = {2026},
doi = {10.1145/3744916.3773268}
}