Social Barriers Faced by Newcomers Placing Their First Contribution in Open Source Software Projects

What is it about?

In this paper, we report barriers newcomers face when trying to make their first contributions to Open Source Software (OSS) projects. We give a comprehensive view but focus on the social barriers, comparing OSS projects to other collaborative communities. We hope OSS communities and tool developers make use of these results to improve the experience of newcomers to OSS.

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Why is it important?

This is the first work to give a comprehensive view of the barriers newcomers face when trying to contribute for the first time, which are particularly important since many newcomers want to make a single contribution.