owned this note   changed 4 years ago  
Linked with GitHub

Digital Infrastructure Research Program Collaborative Notes

Funded Project Presentations

University of Washington (Kaylea Champion, Benjamin Mako Hill, Aaron Shaw, Morten Warncke-Wang) — Underproduction

  • community data science collective
  • mostly quantitative methods - conceptual and statistical models
  • supply and demand - (someone else pls add notes on this)
  • how to measure risk - projects that are low quality but highly used?
  • Q: what do you mean by quality? A: severity of bugs, community dynamics& social structures, but focus mainly on bugs.
  • Q: what project are you focusing on? A: Debian project, we have access to lots of data on that (Mel’s note: I don’t know what the W project is, can anyone expand? (answer from Kaylea: Debian not W :D had not noticed how similar those words sound when spoken!) (Mel response: OH. YES. That makes so much more sense - and of course the interpreters didn’t know Debian and thought they’d heard "W," and I didn’t think of the aural similarites.))

Anushah Hossain — Supporting international OS communities

  • looking at a FOSS project called "brave"
  • case study
  • mostly Western contributors (SFO hub), but there’s a Bangladesh community
  • …how?
  • politics, economics, gender, comms channels, language, ideology, etc.
  • Q: How active will Brave SF be? A: Bangladesh has become a model for other international groups for Brave (sorry, missed start of answer, can someone fill in?)

Frank Timmes et al. ASU, UC Santa Barbara, U Wisconsin-Madison

  • Relationship between money and sustainability in stellar astrophysics
  • Injecting resources into a project: when does it help, when does it hurt?
  • Science-based software - is it sustainable?
  • Ecosystem of different astrophysics projects, we’re involved in Mesa
  • Looking at bibliometric, $, dev, and user stats
  • Will host 2-day workshop at Kavli Institute of Theoretical Physics
  • Looking at developing framework for how software dev can advance astrophysics
  • Q: What are the metrics?

Erin Ytsma and Jana Gallus (Carnegie Mellon and UCLA) — Studies into motivation with non-monetary incentives

  • How can we leverage social feedback (e.g., upvotes, downvotes) that exists within platforms more effectively?
  • What happens when feedback is private, public, when the content changes, etc. and how this impacts behavior and productivity
  • How do this affect productivity: quantity and quality of work, not only code-related work
  • Effect on people’s satisfaction through a survey (when/on what, missed this part or maybe they didn’t say yet?)
  • Focused primarily on field experiment(s) dones in a naturalistic setting with observation.
  • Interested in how these sorts of interventions and forms of feedback might "backfire."
  • Q: Are you studying closed/inner source studies? A: Yes.
  • infrastructures as regulation (InfraReg): examines the regulatory dimensions of infrastructure at a global scale focusing on its legal elements www.iilj.org/infrareg
  • What role does law play in digital infrascture and how does this affect human beavior that then feeds back into law? In particular: How does law contribute to the undersupply of digital infra maintenance?
  • How can we change the law/institutions to support digital infrastructure?
  • Group has built on work on law and global governance with a strong basis in social theory (e.g., Latour♥, Foucault♥)
  • International law between nations - not always the right model, things are incredibly interconnected
  • International organizations are increasingly reliant on open source code for humanitarian purposes
  • Q: diagram that looks like exploding potato (💥🥔)?

University of Canberra (Mathieu O’Neil et al. including with zack@debian) — Organizational hybridity

  • organizational hybridity
  • to what extent are F/OSS projects supported by waged labor, how does this affect project cohesion/sustainability?
  • how does this affect what practices/rules/etc emerge in the project community?
  • how do they manage commercial objectives in a project?
  • methodology
    • content/network analysis of information tech media (news) outlets
    • content & discourse analysis of 5 case studies from news outlets
    • embedded ethnography in 2 conventions and in-depth semistructure interviews
  • trace out relationships between entities/organizations
  • looking at greater awareness of digital infra in society
  • thinking about publishing in the Journal of Peer Production #13 OPEN (April 2019) (he's an editor/founder of the journal)
  • thinking about publishing at least X% of pubs in Open Access venues (Q: why not 100%?)

CMU (Laura Dabbish, Jim Herbsleb plus others not here) — Divisity and inclusion in digital infrastructure projects

  • diversity and inclusion in digital infra projects
  • women are underrepresented in technology and FLOSS seems to be much worse than the general technology field (23% of US programmers are women, 5% of FOSS contributors to public github repos are women)
  • how do women become integrated into projects
  • how do social network structures influence participation over time
    • social network analysis
    • interviews & observations to "zoom in" to understand why women/men stay in/drop out of projects
  • e.g., Working groups in CHAOSS
  • Asks: related works, connections, methods, deep thoughts, other people working on similar projects in similar spaces
  • comment (steve jacobs, RIT): the “teaching open source” community has identified "friendly" projects for their students, can connect - http://teachingopensource.org

Berkeley, San Diego, etc (Stu Geiger w/ Dorothy Howard presenting) —The Visible and Invisible Work of Maintaining Open Source Infrastructure

  • maintainer labor - invisible labor especially
  • methods:
    • sample on various projects based on size, importance, etc. but w/ a focus on bigger/more important projects
    • ethnographic interviews (plan to do ~30-40)
    • quantitative/trace ethnographic studies
  • looking at contributor burnout - psychological/emotional experiences: what does it mean and how can we build a better understanding of what this looks like by talking to people
  • contributors in FLOSS are often asked to do things that are maybe not the kinds of things that they "signed up for" (e.g., community management, project planning)
    • Mel’s note: wrote a magazine column related to this http://www.asee-prism.org/unstable-equilibrium-sep/ - possibly also relevant to previous project on diversity/inclusion: short version is "what happens when you have to terraform a project in order to simply exist within it?"
      • Stu: Yes! We're definitely thinking about this, would love to chat more. We have a recent article on the work of documentation [link], which also raised these issues. Like what is considered a "technical" contribution and who "cleans up" after others.
  • important to set expectations, esp with funding –- number of code commits might go down when someone is funded, b/c they are doing more invisible work

Stanford from Digital Civil Society Lab (Lucy Bernholz and ???) —

  • definition of 'critical' - definition of 'digital infrastructure'
  • Going back to conversations about infrastructure in the physical space (telecommunication, etc) and what are the principles that are brought from there
  • Three different discplinary/methodological approaches (what are they?)
    • democracy theory
    • legal scholarship
  • looking the history of physical infrastructure
  • Q: how do we want to think about National Security? A: It should be critical and we should focus.
  • Focused primarily on EU and US
  • Q: When is it OK to let infrastructure die?
  • Q: Will you be focusing on how different groups define things?

Martin Michlmayr — FOSS Foundations

  • Many examples of foundations in this space: Linux Foundation, Software (Freedom?) Conservancy, Apache Foundation.etc
  • These organizations tend to do a lot of the bureaucratic stuff like bookkeeping, fundraising, holding assets, providing neutral venues, etc.
  • RQ: How do these foundations contribute to the sustainability and success of the projects that form digital infrastructure?
  • Understanding foundations - what do they do? Create classifications, share best practices, identify challenges
  • Analyze and share best practices
  • Identify challenges between them (many of the problems that affect organizations are common across many of them)
  • Qualitative - interview-based, also using public data
    • Begin by interviewing people to talk to them about the RQs above
  • Focused on being very practical: what do these foundations do, how could do they be it better?
    • Hopefully will result in more resources going to foundation (e.g., volunteers and money)
    • Produce a list of funding priorities
  • Foundations are like the garbage collection. They do a lot of work and people typicaly don't notice their presence until they go away and stop doing it.
  • Challenges: I can do the work but disseminating it is going to be challenging (e.g., how to make things pretty, how to move them)

RIT (Mel Chua + Stephen Jacobs) — How do people define sustainable?

  • looking at upstream maintainer/contributors to a digital infra project AND downstream developers whose technical work uses that project as a dependency
  • asking all these people what they think of that project’s sustainability, what they mean by "sustainability” (what are the elements of it, etc.) and who’s responsible for each element - will look at narratives/answers to \
  • qualitative approach:
    • three rounds of narrative interviews (all of which are going to be shared publicly at every stage of the research)
    • will focus on a single project (but haven't decided which one yet, pls help)
    • mapping both upstreams/downstreams by asking people in projects what they rely on (and do so recusrively)
    • narratives with all those people what they rely on at each of those recursive levels that try to unpack questions about sustainability
  • Focused on ontology building, looking at and celebrating a diversity of conceptualizations, building awareness of this diveristy, not attempting to build a grand theory of sustainability or to find the "best" definition
  • "radically transparent qualitative research" – posting materials publically and encouraging reflection between multiple levels

Implicit Development Environments based in Berlin

  • Runs a small foundations that has distributed millions of € to FLOSS projects
  • Focused on the needs of small teams working on infrastructure
  • how can funders/leaders meet the needs of digital infra projects?
    • How are these needs (of infra projects) different from the needs of applications-level projects?
    • Especially curious about governance structures, etc.
  • Combine grounded theory and social shaping of technology
  • Currently focused on literature review and interviews
  • Will conduct expert interviews
  • Will conduct 5 case studies
  • thinking about zines/podcasts for dissemination

Subject Matter Experts

Matt Germonprez (University of Nebraska, Omaha)

  • fieldwork - participant observation, etc.
  • Looking at CHAOSS project - community health analytics open source software, started by Linux foundation 1.5 years ago
  • What are the tools & methods we can use to see what we want to see?
  • seeks to support work of this body of projects

Nadia Eghbal (Independent Researcher at Protocol Labs)

  • trying to summarize previous research on FOSS
  • what are the limitations of physical infra as a metaphor for digital infra?
  • focusing on larger projects/communities (did I get that right?)
  • coming up with definitions related to the project
  • I live in SFO, lmk if you are nearby
  • https://nadiaeghbal.com/

Ben Nickolls (octobox)

  • here because he's interested
  • worked doing service-based work at My Society
  • Has been building businesses in a "small way" on top of FLOSS projects for years
  • Worked on libraries.io, worked at tidelift.com (yep)
  • current project: octobox
  • interested and has a broad appreciation of both economic and social issues
  • https://medium.com/@BenJam

Anna Filippova (GitHub)

  • works with stakeholders on figuring out what to build/not/etc.
  • a collaborator/contributors for the octoverse report
  • What does sustainability mean to maintainers/users/etc
  • Going to be running a survey of GitHub folks and is willing to put questions onto the survey (especially things around questions of sustainability)
  • Has a background in communication and has used/loved social theory
  • can help with uses of github dataset

Benjamin Mako Hill (University of Washington)

Common Questions that seem to apply to many projects:

  • How are you going to measure and/or define sustainability, quality, productivity, and similar?
    • The Stanford project seems to be focused at least in part on answering this question in its attempt to define "critical"
    • The RIT project will be looking at how upstreams/downstreams of digital infra define "sustainable"
  • How will you identify projects/participants?
  • how to understand hybrid structure of volunteers/government/non-profit/corporate interests

Resources / Links

Polis poll report

Reading list

Organized by category

Open source basics

Economics

Licenses

Scholars

Case Studies

Governance

Culture

Hacking

Labor

Security (personal/institutional/national)

Infrastructure

Note: This is a quite random selection of "infrastructure" literature curated by NYU's IILJ project on "infrastructures as regulation" (InfraReg): www.iilj.org/infrareg

  • Nikhil Anand, Akhil Gupta, Hannah Appel (eds), 'The Promise of Infrastructure' (2018): https://www.dukeupress.edu/the-promise-of-infrastructure
  • Jean-François Auger, Jan Jaap Bouma and Rolf Künneke, eds., Internationalization of Infrastructures (Delft: Delft University of Technology, 2009).
  • Baldwin, J. R., & Dixon, J. (2008). Infrastructure Capital: What Is It?Where Is It? How Much of It Is There? (Research Paper, Statistics Canada, Micro-economic Analysis Division, Canadian Ministry of Industry No. 16)
  • Calderon, C., & Serven, L. (2004). The Effects of Infrastructure Development on Growth and Income Distribution. World Bank Working Papers, (WPS 3400)
  • Ashley Carse, ‘Keyword: Infrastructure – How a humble French engineering term shaped the modern world’, in Penelope Harvey, Casper Bruun Jensen, and Atsuro Morita (eds), Infrastructures and Social Complexity : A Companion (Routledge, 2016), pp. 39-49
  • Paul Edwards, ‘Infrastructure and Modernity: Force, Time, and Social Organization in the History of Sociotechnical Systems’, in TJ Misa, P Brey, A Feenberg (eds) Modernity and Technology (MIT Press, 2002), pp. 185–225
  • Frischmann, Brett, "Infrastructure: The Social Value of Shared Resources" (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2012)
  • Gramlich, E.M.: "Infrastructure Investment: A Review Essay", Journal of Economic Literature, 32(3), 1176–1196 (1994)
  • P. Harvey, C. Jensen, & A. Morita (eds.), "Infrastructures and Social Complexity" (New York: Routledge 2017).
  • Brian Larkin, “The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure”, Annual Review of Anthropology 42, no. 1 (2013): 327 – 343
  • Brian Larkin, ‘Promising Forms: The Political Aesthetics of Infrastructure’, in The Promise of Infrastructure, N. Anand, A. Gupta, and H. Appel (eds), Duke University Press (2018), pp. 175-202
  • Shannon Mattern, "Scaffolding, Hard and Soft: Media Infrastructures as Critical and Generative Structures" In Jentery Sayers, Ed., The Routledge Companion to Media Studies and Digital Humanities (Routledge, 2018)
  • Star, S. L. (1999). The Ethnography of Infrastructure. American Behavioral Scientist, 43(3), 377–391.
  • Mariana Valverde, Fleur Johns and Jennifer Raso, 'Governing Infrastructure in the Age of the "Art of the Deal": Logics of Governance and Scales of Visibility' (2018) 41(1) Political and Legal Anthropology Review 118

Ethnographies

Published literature reviews

Cohort Recommendations

Maintainer Survey conversation notes

  • Technical Debt

    • How much tech debt is your project carrying?
    • Different projects different definitions
    • Categories of tech debt
      • Duplicate code
      • Need for refactoring
      • Difficulty in dependency management
      • Other:

  • Internal collaboration practices

  • Intentionality behind the role of a maintainer

    • Did someone fall into this or was it an intentional choice?

  • Governance structure

    • how are decisions being made?

  • Why software is not being maintained? Another way to think about it: competencies

    • Competencies in: accessibility, localization, memory management, optimization, licensing, memory management, diversity and inclusion, other?
    • Matrix: I have expertise in this area, I know where to go for help, this is something I need more resources for, This is not a concern for me

  • Time use for maintainers

    • how much time are they spending?
    • Fine grained view on how they spend their time? Communication with members answering issues?
    • How do people decide how they allocate their effort?
    • Maintainers how to allocate
    • Developer maintenance effort - do they draw boundaries about who gets their request honored?
    • Do they have discretion in how they allocate their time?

  • Economics of engagement

    • Are they paid at all?
    • How do people make money? Patreon, company funded?
    • If the role is paid, how did it work out that way?
    • Return on investment - how does that occur? How is it quantified? Is it?

  • Ideas for how to spend money

    • Some projects find it easier to raise money than spend it

  • Onboarding

    • How do maintainers/community managers grow their contributor base? How they bring people onboard?
    • How do they identify new contributors? Process to become one?
    • Is this different for different kinds of projects (end user vs infrastructure)
    • How do maintainers/community managers perceive their audience? Do they think they have one?

  • How maintainers think about success

    • How do you measure success?
    • What do you look at to understand your project state? (Are they limiting themself to things already visible on GitHub?)
    • Extent to which maintainers are thinking about those things? How important is community health to them?

  • (open ended) What are you most concerned about / what keeps you up at night? (Already in a survey)

  • Repeat survey on a regular basis? Track over time

  • Demographics: type of project, respondent demographics

  • Tool ecosystem

    • What other tools do you use and why?
    • Break out by types of tools: communication tools, project management tools, bug tracking tools etc

  • Maintainer's self perceived role

    • Community management
    • Dependency management
    • Code management e.g. Merging other's PRs
    • Documentation
    • Others, overlap?

  • How close are you to burnout?

    • Do you see yourself as a maintainer a year from now?
    • Is there a succession plan?

  • Does your work feel rewarding?

  • What are outcome measures: satisfaction with process, satisfaction with outcomes?

  • Culture component: values like meritocracy

  • Can we reuse job satisfaction work and measures?

If we interview:

  • Is it clear what is and is not being maintained? Does that play a part in their decision making process?
  • What are signals of a maintained project vs user looking at?
Select a repo