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Katie McLaughlin
Katie McLaughlin

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Open Source Credit Survey

The University of Vermont is conducting a survey to help understand how people receive credit for tasks in open source, and are seeking your participation!
Survey: https://qualtrics.uvm.edu/jfe/form/SV_1zUs19oVcZJ0SPA


Today's open source world has similarities to the world of open source when I first wrote about this problem in 2015. I wrote a tool that helps discover who is contributing to GitHub projects based on the contributions that aren't code. In 2022, we are still contributing countless hours of time towards communities to drive and improve open source across many industries, but we don't know how much of that work is credited beyond automated tools like this.

I'm a member of the OCEAN, a research team from the University of Vermont Complex Systems Center, and we're collaborating with industry experts from Google, OSI, IEEE, PSF, and OSSF, among others. You may have recently heard about our project on CHAOSSCast, or being shout-out on SustainOSS.

As we've written in our correspondence in Nature Computational Science, we believe that having a recognition model for the work done in any open source community can help more in just gaining credit for code, but providing clear signaling of the work done for the community.

As part of this work, the University of Vermont team is conducting a survey about how people receive credit for the tasks they do as part of open source projects.

The survey asks about your experiences with receiving credit on open source projects. The survey asks multiple choice questions about how often you received credit for the tasks you did, and written response questions about what did and did not go well on open source projects.

We hope that with this information, we can improve the equity of contributions across all of open source.


Click on this link to participate in the survey: https://qualtrics.uvm.edu/jfe/form/SV_1zUs19oVcZJ0SPA


OCEAN is a partnership between the Google Open Source Program Office and the Vermont Complex Systems Center. Google does not have any influence on the survey, and will be unable to see any individual responses.

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