Addressing OSS Community Managers' Challenges in Contributor Retention

TL;DR

This study addresses the challenge of retaining contributors in OSS communities by transitioning from retrospective dashboards to proactive, predictive diagnostics. Guided by Design Science Research, the authors combine interviews, literature, and expert surveys to identify 10 retention challenges and synthesize nine actionable strategies, which are operationalized in a web-based prototype evaluated in two distinct OSS communities. The in-situ evaluation with Pyomo and DeepSpeed demonstrates practical usefulness for diagnosing disengagement, onboarding newcomers, and managing contributor health while highlighting privacy considerations and the need for hybrid, longitudinal perspectives. The work contributes empirical insights, a human-centered framework for OSS sustainability research, and a set of design-guided artifacts to help practitioners and researchers develop more proactive retention interventions.

Abstract

Open-source software (OSS) community managers face significant challenges in retaining contributors, as they must monitor activity and engagement while navigating complex dynamics of collaboration. Current tools designed for managing contributor retention (e.g., dashboards) fall short by providing retrospective rather than predictive insights to identify potential disengagement early. Without understanding how to anticipate and prevent disengagement, new solutions risk burdening community managers rather than supporting retention management. Following the Design Science Research paradigm, we employed a mixed-methods approach for problem identification and solution design to address contributor retention. To identify the challenges hindering retention management in OSS, we conducted semi-structured interviews, a multi-vocal literature review, and community surveys. Then through an iterative build-evaluate cycle, we developed and refined strategies for diagnosing retention risks and informing engagement efforts. We operationalized these strategies into a web-based prototype, incorporating feedback from 100+ OSS practitioners, and conducted an in situ evaluation across two OSS communities. Our study offers (1) empirical insights into the challenges of contributor retention management in OSS, (2) actionable strategies that support OSS community managers' retention efforts, and (3) a practical framework for future research in developing or validating theories about OSS sustainability.

Figures (3)

• Figure 1: Method Overview
• Figure 2: User-centered design process illustrating iterative design and implementation cycles, incorporating multiple focus group discussions with over 100 OSS stakeholders.
• Figure 3: – represent strategy indices, as defined in Table \ref{['tab:strategies']}. Sections A–D illustrate different components of the prototype, including automation setup (A), project retention overview (B), survival analysis (C), contributor attrition analysis (D) and inactive/newcomer/Tag management (E). Additional detailed views are indicated as D’ and E’, corresponding to contributor-specific data and tag management. See the supplementary materials for the walk-through video suppl.