一句话：通过516,893个Python项目的实证建模，发现项目外部劳动力池的规模、技能匹配、社会联系与竞争显著影响其吸引新开发者。
开源项目的可持续性常取决于能否吸引和留住新开发者。既有研究多关注项目内部特征，却较少考察项目外部因素。本文聚焦项目的“劳动力池”，即某一时刻整个开源生态中该项目可能招募到的活跃贡献者集合。作者对超过516,893个Python项目进行实证研究，分析劳动力池规模、技术技能匹配、劳动力池成员与目标项目成员之间的社会联系，以及劳动力池重叠带来的项目间竞争如何影响新开发者数量。结果表明，这些劳动力池因素均显著影响项目吸引力，且相比仅使用项目级特征的模型，加入劳动力池因素能带来可观的额外解释力。评估基于大规模观测数据的统计建模，而非受控实验或工具实现。
Attracting and retaining new developers is often at the heart of open-source project sustainability and success. Previous research found many intrinsic (or endogenous) project characteristics associated with the attractiveness of projects to new developers, but the impact of factors external to the project itself have largely been overlooked. In this work, we focus on one such external factor, a project's labor pool, which is defined as the set of contributors active in the overall open-source ecosystem that the project could plausibly attempt to recruit from at a given time. How are the size and characteristics of the labor pool associated with a project's attractiveness to new contributors? Through an empirical study of over 516,893 Python projects, we found that the size of the project's labor pool, the technical skill match, and the social connection between the project's labor pool and members of the focal project all significantly influence the number of new developers that the focal project attracts, with the competition between projects with overlapping labor pools also playing a role. Overall, the labor pool factors add considerable explanatory power compared to models with only project-level characteristics.
@inproceedings{FangHV23,
title = {Matching Skills, Past Collaboration, and Limited Competition: Modeling When Open-Source Projects Attract Contributors},
author = {Hongbo Fang and James Herbsleb and Bogdan Vasilescu},
booktitle = {FSE},
year = {2023},
doi = {10.1145/3611643.3616282}
}