Paper Info
Title
Newcomers' Barriers. . . Is That All? An Analysis of Mentors' and Newcomers' Barriers in OSS Projects.
Abstract
Newcomers’ seamless onboarding is important for open collaboration communities, particularly those that leverage outsiders’ contributions to remain sustainable. Nevertheless, previous work shows that OSS newcomers often face several barriers to contribute, which lead them to lose motivation and even give up on contributing. A well-known way to help newcomers overcome initial contribution barriers is mentoring. This strategy has proven effective in offline and online communities, and to some extent has been employed in OSS projects. Studying mentors’ perspectives on the barriers that newcomers face play a vital role in improving onboarding processes; yet, OSS mentors face their own barriers, which hinder the effectiveness of the strategy. Since little is known about the barriers mentors face, in this paper, we investigate the barriers that affect mentors and their newcomer mentees. We interviewed mentors from OSS projects and qualitatively analyzed their answers. We found 44 barriers: 19 that affect mentors; and 34 that affect newcomers (9 affect both newcomers and mentors). Interestingly, most of the barriers we identified (66%) have a social nature. Additionally, we identified 10 strategies that mentors indicated to potentially alleviate some of the barriers. Since gender-related challenges emerged in our analysis, we conducted nine follow-up structured interviews to further explore this perspective. The contributions of this paper include: identifying the barriers mentors face; bringing the unique perspective of mentors on barriers faced by newcomers; unveiling strategies that can be used by mentors to support newcomers; and investigating gender-specific challenges in OSS mentorship. Mentors, newcomers, online communities, and educators can leverage this knowledge to foster new contributors to OSS projects.
Year
DOI
Venue
2018
10.1007/s10606-018-9310-8
Computer Supported Cooperative Work
Keywords
Field
DocType
Challenges,Difficulties,Obstacles,Joining process,Onboarding,Mentor,Coach,Tutor,Newbie,Newcomer,Novice,Open source software
TUTOR,Mentorship,Onboarding,Structured interview,Computer science,Knowledge management,Open collaboration,Social nature,Open source software
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
27
3-6
0925-9724
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
12
0.51
46
Authors
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Sogol Balali1152.58
Igor Steinmacher252546.19
Umayal Annamalai3120.51
Anita Sarma441531.91
Marco Aurélio Gerosa584463.78