What makes the right OSS contributor tick? Treatments to motivate high-skilled developers
Inna Smirnova, Markus Reitzig, Oliver Alexy
Abstract
We study how OSS project owners can manage their repositories so as to motivate particularly high-skilled coders to exert continuous effort after joining a project. Drawing on literature from personnel economics, we lay out how coders’ skill level affects their selection for a focal project in the first place. In turn, we theorize how project-specific norms and quality aspirations that developers learn about after joining an OSS project represent treatments that varyingly entice developers to contribute more code conditional on their skill level. Based on a custom-tailored dataset merging GitHub and Stack Overflow data for almost 50,000 contributor-project-month observations, we find that repository owners are able to motivate their most talented volunteer contributors when they (1) show no visible commercial orientation while managing their projects, (2) show generosity in accepting external contributions, and (3) provide fast feedback. We discuss implications for research and practice in the fields of community-based organizations like OSS as well as personnel economics.